Luck

I was lucky today.  Chase sent a replacement credit card, and it arrived on Friday.  I tossed the mail in the front seat for the school run, and somehow the Chase envelope fell out in the school parking lot.  Which I didn't realize until later last night when I was looking at the mail. 

Drove back to the school lot today, and there's the envelope, right where it fell. 

Whew.

Fun with old food

So, I may have a bit of a collection going, of old small cookbooks from the 40s, 50s and 60s.  Think brochure-sized.  With a subset of Jello recipes.  Because back then, people would put anything in Jello, and I do mean anything.  Meat, shrimp, spam, canned tuna.  Mayonnaise.    Sour cream.  Canned tomatoes. 

So, a collection of favorite online links:

Save Time and Money with a Refrigerator from the Awful Library Books website

The Gallery of Regrettable Food  with pictures (From the genius behind Interior Desecrations and other fun collections.  I especially like the Vacations section.)

Retro Recipes, featuring lots of oldies

Mid Century Menu with more vintage

The MSU Library's "Feeding America" historical collection

Kitsch Bitch on Facebook always has fun pictures.


And someday I'll find a better, more readable, version of this ad from Campbell's Soup.  

Soup Shakes.  Because drinking cold Cream of Chicken soup sounds delicious.

Image won't load.  Will try again.

I suck at summer

Yes, it's been a while. The PC got a virus and I was offline for a while. Still don't have things totally cleared up, which sucks.

Also, I suck at summer planning. Just realized El B has 2.5 weeks of summer vacation left, part of which is already blocked off for a sleepover at Grandma's, and we haven't really done anything this summer. We've left the county twice, for pete's sake, both times for trips to my parents'. (Not what you'd call a "vacation" at all.)

That list of fun local stuff to do? Didn't do any of it. I planned to go on campus to the college's art & archaeology museum, but I realized tonight that classes start next week and parking will be a crazy mess.

The box of craft kits and list of fun little projects? Totally forgotten. We did one, and it's still unfinished. Our main accomplishment has been 3 sets of caterpillars from his Live Butterfly Garden. Wow. Oh, and he saw two movies - Cars 2 and the new Winnie the Pooh movie.

He spent most of his summer watching TV, and it makes me feel like s**t because it's my fault.

We didn't go to the farmers' market, the park, the museum, the zoo (okay, 3 hour drive, but still), nothing. I didn't even manage to call his best pal from preschool for a playdate yet.


I suck.

Giveaway on another blog

I just entered a giveaway contest on another blog:
http://adeliciousmelody.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/reisenthel-easybag-giveaway/

That Reisenthel bag looks beyond nifty. It would be a cool thing to win, and if not, I may be tempted to buy one from Reuseit.com.

Strange conversation

Got shanghaied into a very strange conversation at the book sale on Sunday. Started as random chitchat over the lousy selection of DVDs that were left, and ended up with an older gentlemen giving a monologue to me about journalism and random conspiracies. He's a self-proclaimed expert on the Amish, subject of a show on the local PBS station, former journalist for a big paper in Hartford CT, and blacklisted author who's written 22 books with 2 in progress (which seems contradictory). His theories include that the CIA assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. and have it on video, and that Sonny Bono was murdered to prevent him leaking information about some drug trafficking with Bill Clinton and George Bush the Elder.

I managed to hmm and "oh really" for a few minutes until he was distracted by something, and then I quickly moseyed the other way. I heard him talking out in the hall a few minutes later, still about Sonny Bono's death.

And I thought the guy walking around at the sale talking to himself was odd - he was saying "oh boy" and similar phrases, but not in a "wow, that's a good book" way. More of a "can't believe they're selling this" way or something. Plus, body odor. Common at book sales, where it mixes with the old-book smell.

A quote

And for a moment, as she sat there with her friend, with the late-afternoon sun slanting in through the window, she thought about how she owed her father so much. He had taught her almost everything she knew about how to lead a good life, and the lessons she had learned from him were as fresh today as they ever had been. Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

She closed her eyes. You can do that in the company of an old friend -- you can close your eyes an d think of the land that gave you life and breath, and of all the reasons why you are glad that you are there, with the people you know, with the people you love.

(Alexander McCall Smith - The Double Comfort Safari Club, p. 211.)

Strange associations

I'm way way behind on Lost, but no matter how often I saw Keamy being wicked on the Island, I always said"Hey, it's Zippy!!" every time Kevin Durand's face popped up on-screen.

Yes, I'm a bit of a Stargate geek. Zippy was Jack's nickname for the Goa'uld Lord Zipacna, named for a Mayan god.

I'm rare

If this survey/poll in American Baby is close to accurate, I'm one of the 10% of people who didn't know if the baby was a boy or a girl before it was born.

This proves it, I'm special. :)

Email avalanche

You know, it stinks to have over 3,500 unread messages in your Inbox.

That's all I can come up with for today. El Burrito didn't nap, and my 85-year-old grandfather had a hip replacement today. Oh, and my niece-dog had a fatty growth removed from her back.

Questions

What's the deal with maternity portraits and plaster casts of pregnant stomachs? I love the Burrito, but I looked (I thought) like crap while I was pregnant. No way do I want to pay for a professional picture to prove it. I've got enough of our pics to do that, thanks. The plaster belly casts are even weirder to me, though. What do you do with it? Hang it on the wall like a shield, use it for a mega-sized chip bowl?

Coupons and stuff

Random notes:

The "Pack a Kraft Smile" coupon/calendar booklet that I got from Kraft arrived last week. Some of the coupons were good ones, but I was a little peeved that three of the coupons had already expired!

Gorton's was nice enough to send me a free-item coupon after I let them know about some pretty low-quality tilapia fillets I bought. Peter Pan cheaped out a bit with a 50-cent coupon after I complained about their container shrinkage (18-oz is now either 12 or 15). Sure, they're using less plastic, but the price didn't go down when the jar size did.

Coupons.com is a good site for coupons, but their printer is a little odd. I tried to print 3 coupons last night. The site printed those three, plus six that I didn't want and can't use. Strange.

Weird note, not that the person in question will ever read it.
Someone on a local listserv has been convinced that there will be mandatory flu shots for H1N1 this year (and related conspiracy theories). I don't see it happening, just because a) we don't have mandatory vax for anything else and b) the companies don't have the supply to vaccinate everyone. They're already publicizing the priority ranking for who should get the shots first.

A math problem

The gas company sends us 12 self-stick address labels per year (being too cheap to spring for envelopes). We use 12 address labels per year to pay the bill (keeping the PO in business).

So how, I wonder, did we end up with 27 labels sitting in the bill organizer? Aside from having an extra year+ worth, it doesn't add up. Using 7 more this year leaves 20, which isn't a multiple of 12. Either we lost 4 somewhere along the way, or we've gained 8 from spawning labels.

Random notes

National Geographic doesn't do well when wet. Spilled tea = wrinkles and cracks.

Weird!

Turns out, Wil Wheaton is just a few months older than me.

Which seems wrong, for some reason. Not sure why, or if some part of my brain is stuck in old TNG reruns and thinks he should be younger than me, or what.

It's just a little disconcerting today.

Might have been

I had a good fun-for-Friday picture I was going to put here.

El Burrito got a sticker at the library yesterday, a picture of a cat that was channeling Elton John. Had to be the tinted glasses and hat. Funny stuff.

Except that before I could get a picture of it, it fell off the bathroom door (landing pad for storytime stickers) and DH tossed it. Sigh.

So imagine a picture of a fluffy white cat wearing yellow-tinted wire-rims and a white straw hat.

things I learned this weekend

One: if you buy a Mylar helium balloon in a somewhat warm store and take it out into 30-degree temps, it shrinks quickly and noticeably. If you then put it into a car and turn on the heat, you can actually hear the Mylar crinkling as it expands again.

Two: If you leave your refillable ice pack/hot water bottle in the bottom drawer for eight years, the rubberized lining becomes unhappy. When you fill it with ice to treat a goose-egg on a Burrito's head, the lining expresses that unhappiness by leaking like a sieve.

Questions

Random questions:

• Why do companies put cryptic codes on food products, instead of a user-friendly Use/Eat/Sell by date?
  
• Why do said companies a) not answer their toll-free number and b) want everything short of a Social Security number before they'll let you send them an email?

I've been cleaning out corners here and there, and came across three cake mixes that didn't have either a Use By date or a Sharpie'd "we bought this on" date. They do have a fairly useless code printed on the box, but it's nothing we can decipher, and the Pillsbury website doesn't have a decoder ring. I took a shot and cooked one of the mixes last week. Yeah, it's a little past it's prime. After it was done (passed the toothpick test), it was maybe 1.5 inches deep. And it shrank around the edges. A lot. It smelled okay, so we tried a slice. Edible, but not so great. We tossed most of it.

Today I tried again, this time with a box that was only best by February 2007. I took the precaution of adding a touch of fresh baking powder. This one came out much better. It's not a pancake.

Tried calling Pillsbury this morning, listened to the recording, and attempted to talk to a live person. The phone rang at least a dozen times before I gave up. I just sent them an email via their webform, asking how to translate their codes.

Customer service and shipping - part 2

I got another shipping notice from History.com yesterday. One little problem - the DVD they were notifying me about? Yeah, it was delivered a full 10 days ago.

Interesting. I wonder why this shipment was so unusual.

Nice vacation

I'm Back!

Yeah, not much blogging over the holidays. DH had some "use it or lose it" vacation time that he used, so he was home a lot. Somehow, though, the To Do list didn't get any shorter, and the house looks worse than usual. He's got another day or two off, though, so I need to get the Must Do list ready. I can install my new mouse, but he's the Geek in Charge of Anything Inside the Case - like the Firewire card we bought months ago.

More on our Holiday Adventures later.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Schulz

Today would have been Charles Schulz's 86th birthday. Happy Birthday, sir, and thanks for all the fond memories.

I've been reading the Complete Peanuts lately, thanks to the library. I finished the strips from 1959 today, and I've got the next 2 volumes (4 years' worth) from the library this week. It's interesting to see how things evolved over the years, and how many little things turned up later in the television specials. There are some pretty good biographical essays and interviews in the books, too.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is, in my opinion, the gold standard for the Peanuts specials and for most animated holiday specials. It's the closest to perfect that I can think of right now.