That would have to be this guy, who I suppose by his own Illogic 101 doesn’t have a job that was created by the government. And didn’t have one when he was Lt. Gov., either. And all those emergency services people working at the federal, state, and local level? No jobs for them, either. Military personnel? Nope. And on and on. It’s hard to believe the depths of stupidity this one statement encompasses.
Category Archives: Odds and ends
Signs of the times
On (yet another) visit to the dentist today – another root canal, yay – I saw these signs:
From a church: “If I’m ok and your ok then why did Jesus die on the cross?”
Beyond what I see as the lack of logic behind the question, did you run out of apostrophes and misplace that other letter e in your collection? Maybe you should pass the plate at your next service.
From a swimming pool place:
“Summers on it’s way”
Four words. Very simple. Is it so difficult to get it right?
By the way, if anyone happens to stumble across this blog looking for cancer-related information, especially for oral cancer, let me make this recommendation: find yourself a dentist who knows something about oncology as it relates to dental health. Make sure you get your dental work done BEFORE you go in for surgery or radiation/chemo. If you have wisdom teeth that need to come out, get them out – hell, even if they don’t need to come out, get them out. While you’re going through treatment, to avoid the rather hideous issues with trismus that I have since no one apaprently deemed it important enough to stress that this should be done, make sure you do some stretching of your mouth throughout, even though you aren’t likely to be eating or drinking much by mouth. It may be painful, especially when the burns start showing up on your face and neck and any movement hurts, but do it anyway: hop yourself up on the pain meds and do the stretching. It will be worth it after treatment when you’re able to fully open your mouth instead of having a very limited opening that makes eating diffcult and dental work (and you’ll need dental work, trust me: the lack of salivary function is hateful to oral health) a frustrating, time-consuming, and very painful event. If I had to do it over, I would have a) found my current dentist first, rather than getting a cursory review from my previous dentist who deemed everything “ok” and left me with two impacted wisdom teeth, one of which is now starting to appear through the ripped skin at the back of my mouth and which will be incredibly tedious to address should it need any work, and b) done daily and frequent stretching exercises to keep my jaw muscles from contracting and the scar tissue from building up to the point where my opening is extremely limited at 18-20 millimeters. Know how limited that is? Put your thumb between your teeth, so the nail points either to the left or right, depending on which hand you’re using. That’s how far I can open my mouth. Don’t end up like this.
Death and life and death and life
It isn’t just animals that die, of course. People can (and do) die both suddenly and not so suddenly.
Case in point: one of our customers, who had been with us since almost the very first, died unexpectedly early in February of a heart attack. We did not discover this until late in the month when one of his clients contacted us directly. While it probably will not be the last time we have to do this, it is a bit odd and sad to have to make arrangements for the disposition of his client accounts with us, as the rest of his family knows nothing about what he was doing and has no idea how to provide hosting support to those clients. I’ve been working on notices to those clients, straddling the line between breaking news they may not know and yet being businesslike enough to make sure that they understand what has to be done.
But life carries on, no matter what happens to us. It may be difficult, it may strain the people left behind (one of my chief concerns should anything happen to me), but on it goes.
Another case in point: one of my mom’s old long-term neighbors (Jo, in case those of you reading this knew her) died in February as well, the same week Boots did. She had been receiving treatment for cancer that had invaded her brain, and they found out it had spread to her liver. She’d been in the hospital for a bit, but when there was nothing more they could do, they brought her home with Hospice care. She died that same night, around midnight.
But again, life carries on, and we move on with it.
I knew someone once who was incredibly anguished about all the bad things that happen in life, and dwelt constantly on that aspect: wasn’t it horrible, life is unfair, it all seems such a waste, how can we possibly go through all this, and the same, ad nauseum, with no break of sunshine, ever.
How can we go through all this? How can we not?
Attention, feeders
One of you left a digital camera charger, with a battery, at the estate on Saturday. No doubt all the food put you into a semi-coma. It’s a Canon charger, with a Canon NB4L type battery in it. Get in touch with us, please, so we can get it back to you. Thanks.
Adsensical
Probably should have picked the Giants to win last night. Once again, just as they did in Green Bay, they came to play with much more intensity than their opponent. One of the better games over the years I’ve been watching football.
The ads, however, left quite a lot to be desired. No Budweiser frogs, no office linebackers. Instead, a mostly uninspired and, at time, downright offensive collection of ads.
The worst of the bunch: the salesgenie ads, with their strange insistence on stereotypical, annoying caricatures. The Audi ad, which was just plain awful. The E*Trade baby ads….creeeeepy. IceBreakers, completely forgettable. Shaq and the tiny horse in the vitamin water ad. Doritos’ “Message from Your Heart”, which could be a good song, if sung by someone else. PepsiMax and the bobbleheads. GoDaddy with yet another attempt at T&A, just as stupid and sleazy as everything else they do. UnderArmour. Ray Lewis leading what resembles nothing so much as a fascist mob.
The WTF ads: Gatorade’s water drinking dog (although this did make Mickey perk his head up, since that is exactly how he sounds when he’s slurping up water). Naomi Campbell dancing around with a bunch of fire-farting lizards for SoBe Life. Planters Nuts with Frau Unibrow. The talking stain for Tide to Go. Dell Red: if you buy this laptop, people will cheer you for no other reason when you’re walking down the street – and as a bonus, will slap your butt?
The movies: Iron Man. Yes.
The snoozers: Claritin. Sunsilk. Drug dealer: thanks for alerting the kids that they can go raid the medicine cabinets in their parents’ bathrooms. Bud’s Rocky-inspired Clydesdale.
The “Eh, you could have done better, but these were mildly amusing” group: All the Bud Light ads. The CareerBuilder ads (the “Follow your heart” ad was better than the firefly ad). Cars.com (the deathmatch in the circle of fire was better than the witch doctor). PepsiStuff, which only made it into this group because Justin Timberlake got racked in the crotch. Coke. Toyota Corolla, because the world needs more face-eating badgers. Gatorade and the path of green.
The best:
Bridgestone’s screaming squirrel (if only for the almost-too-tiny-to-hear screaming cricket). Not so much their unexpected obstacles ad.
Doritos’ “Mouse Attack”.
Garmin (gar-meen), with Napoleon zipping around in a tiny car, background soundtrack a perfect French cruising tune.
FedEx, once again checking in with a good one: giant, mutant pigeons creating havoc in the city when used to deliver packages.
The NFL ad with Chester Pitts playing the oboe: awesome.
Likewise, the T-Mobile “Fave 5” ad with Charles Barkley and Dwayne Webb: “I don’t want to look too fat in high-definition. That’s what HD stands for. Did you know that?”…”And that’s why I don’t eat shrimp.”
Frosty mornings
Our freeze/no-freeze/frost overnight betting pool – wouldn’t you love to be the weather person, where you really don’t need to get it right, ever? – turned out to be frost. I stepped outside with my sister as she was getting ready to head to classes: lock frozen, windows iced, clear and very cold. The veggies were covered in ice crystals, but not rock-hard frozen, and I suppose they’ll make it. The garlic is really the only thing that concerns me. I don’t eat collards, the broccoli, as I mentioned before, isn’t right, the brussels sprouts I don’t eat and are not doing anything from their transplanted states, and the lettuces/spinach seem to be just fine, although they also seem to be frozen in time, having not changed in size very much over the past couple of weeks. Looking across the road to our neighbors, I saw the western side of their roof covered in frost and glistening as the sun came up.
Standing outside for less than ten minutes made me appreciate even more having the ability to work from anywhere there is a connection to the internet. Even right at home, at my desk, with my heater going full blast under my desk to warm my feet after being outside.
It’s a tough job
But someone has to be the Princess.
Now that I’m no longer watching Food Network and football season is drawing to a close, I have discovered some of the strangest shows I’ve ever seen – they’re new to me, since I rarely watch television other than sports, documentaries, and movies. Among these are shows like Clean House, Clean Sweep, and the one on right now called Wasted Spaces where I gather they usually help people turn wasted space into something useful but on this one are showing a junk-filled house like the other two do normally. I’m sure everyone else is up to speed on these shows, but they surprised the hell out of me. Not because I don’t think people won’t watch them. On the contrary, I have no doubt that there are people quite unlike me, who tune in to every episode of these shows in the same way people tune in to whatever their favorite sitcom happens to be.
What I do not get about these shows is why on earth anyone would want to display their junk for the world to see. Some of these places are hideous, and quite honestly, I’d be ashamed to let anyone see crap piled up in every single room in the house. There is no way I’d be able to live like that – just looking at it gives me the creeps.
At the end of all these shows, the result is pretty much the same: the house is in order, nice and clean, and the people are happy to have their junkiness taken care of for them. What I’d like to know is what happens six months down the road. Does anyone know if these shows go back to the places they’ve cleaned to show what these people are doing now?
Cleaning house
Or at least some files. Being able to take a bazillion shots with a digital camera means there are a bazillion images to sort through “later”. And by “later”, I mean “at some point, probably, when you’re bored out of your mind, taking a break from answering tickets and doing server/network maintenance, and have turned off the tv and disabled the news crawl on the computer screen because it’s all about Heath Ledger dying”. That kind of later.
Awhile back, I had posted a picture of our spidery neighbor, who hung around the front of the place all season. That spider put up a couple of egg sacs and then promptly did what spiders do a few days later. Died.
The eggs are still up there for now, although we’re probably going to have to get rid of them.
Newton likes the organic veggie juice that, coincidentally, my mom also likes.
I’ll add that while I will eat after the dogs when they have had something off my fork, mom refused to drink after Newton. Sissy.
And finally, say hello to my nephew, due in a couple of months. Yours truly will be cooking for the gaggle of girls appearing on the doorstep here for the baby shower.
You bought what?
Why on earth would anyone want this? Certainly no one would need it – a bowl is a bowl, and without the name attached to it, probably half the price. But apparently I am quite out of tune with things, because as I post this, that product is listed as out of stock. Someone is buying this. Who?
Here’s your heart
There are some days when you’re just convinced that the world is full of asshats. The worst is when one of those people manage to fuck up your evening by being total douchebags. I know I shouldn’t take it personally, but some days it gets to me more than others – when all the cosmic shit going on happens to align just so.
Today did not start as one of those days, but it surely did wind up being one. I still cooked, though.
After putting together the dough for the doughnuts – and more about that fiasco later – I started prepping everything that could be done before the time for dinner actually arrived. One of those things was the assembly of the shrimp cocktails.
I also boiled some shrimp with Old Bay and set aside some to marinate. The latter were sauteed as we were sitting down. Much of cooking for a crowd means getting everything to the table at the same time. This is no easy task if you’re an idiot and completely forget about the asparagus, thus holding everything else and thus letting people start in on the shrimp before everything is ready. But since that was minor and asparagus doesn’t take all that long to cook (nor did the sauce), it wasn’t too bad.
Broiled lobster tails, shrimp three ways with cocktail sauce, ginger dipping sauce, rice pilaf with sundried tomatoes, parmesan, and almonds, and asparagus with a mustard-lemon nappe.
After everyone had eaten all of the food – a bit of the rice was all that was left – it was time for doughnuts. The first batch of dough sucked and I tossed it in the trash, where one of the dogs prompty stuck his snoot in and grabbed a piece, swallowing it down before I could get a word out. Fortunately, while I was kneading the first batch, I realized that it would indeed suck and that a backup batch was in order. I had run out to the store to pick up a couple of things, and picked up some fresh flour as well. It made a world of difference. I knew the flour I’ve been bitching about since we got it was to blame for the bready misfortunes I had been encountering.
The dough had gone through the first rise, was rolled out, and went through the second rise.
While they were resting, I put together the glaze, the ganache, and got the oil heated. Now, most places say 350 for the oil, but I’m convinced that a slightly lower temperature is in order, especially seeing how brown some of the pieces got while frying compared to the lighter, doughnutty color we’re all used to when the oil had cooled a bit. Not that it mattered all that much, since it’s hard not to like fried dough. The Boy handled the glazing duties.
Other people volunteered to handle the sampling duties. Sometimes they go a little crazy while doing that very dangerous, thankless job.
Some had to wait a little longer for their tastes, relying on other species with opposable thumbs to bestow their samples.
The doughnuts turned out very well indeed.
The scraps from the first cutting I kneaded back together, then rolled out and formed into crullers, churros, and vague blobs of doughy things.
I think people were happy.
After all, what’s not to like about doughnuts?
