Awful falafel waffles

    I call them this because I'm a fool for rhymes and not good at marketing, though more accurate would be almond chocolate chip shortbread cookies. They turned out fairly brilliant even though I forgot the vanilla. If I remember it next time, they'll be even better. You should try them!
    OK, this time there's no way around it: you're going to have to go to a health food store. Or at least an Indian/Asian foods store. Because this one requires gram (garbanzo bean/ chick pea) flour and brown rice flour, as well as cocoa butter. On the other hand, beans and rice combined make a complete protein. I don't know if the associated flours do, too (processing often destroys a lot of nutritional value), but it's at least possible.
    You might want to start by preheating the oven to 400 degrees. I've learned enough about cooking to mix the wet ingredients first. Then again, since I use honey in everything, it's an open question whether it's liquid or solid. I call it liquid and run with it.
    Ditto the cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is a pain in the butt to find. I could only find it in the health and beauty section of the health food store. (They do assure me it's food grade, and in fact snack on it.) Unfortunately, the packages aren't always the same size, as the cocoa butter comes in chunks. It's always about 3 oz., though; I just use the whole package. Cocoa butter melts at body temperature, but it's surprisingly reluctant to melt. I stick it in a saucepan and put it on medium heat for five minutes or so.
    I do the usual thing with two tablespoons of EV olive oil and four of honey. (That is, one of oil, two of honey, one of oil, two of honey, this to minimize honey sticking to the spoon.) Add half cup of almond milk. Then add the melted cocoa butter. Scramble a large egg and add it. Unlike me, add a teaspoon of vanilla. Mix the heck out of it all.
    Add a cup of garbanzo bean flower and a cup of brown rice flour. Stir until just before your arm falls off. Add a cup of chopped almonds and a quarter cup of chocolate chips. (In gluten-free casein-free soy-free world, this means Enjoy Life brand, but obviously not everybody has the restricted diet I do.) At this point, you have cookie dough, so mix as best you can, but don't worry about it too much.
    Cookie dough is a lot more fun in stories about Grandma's house than in real life, but between a fork and a spatula I was able to transfer the muck to parchment paper. I use parchment paper on a pizza pan or a regular pan since I don't actually have a cookie sheet. I bake the cookies for 10 minutes at 400 degrees. I find them a bit undercooked at this point. I tend to turn the oven off, flip the cookies and put them back in for another 5 minutes.
    Turns out addictive and excellent, like pecan sandies without the pecans. If you just can't find the cocoa butter, I guess you could substitute another quarter cup of chocolate chips. But make sure you have a mountain handy to climb right up; you're likely to have that much energy!

Nightmare because it said so

    Last night I dreamt the least scary nightmare ever. Except that it announced that it was scary, so it was. It even had suspense. I couldn't find my car key. In real life, this would be very bad indeed since there's only the one. (Obvious dream interpretation: my brain telling myself to go get copies made, stupid.) The suspense was that I searched my key chain but the key was not there. Then I looked more carefully and found that it was there but it had split in half with the part that goes into the ignition separating from the part that you grip between thumb and finger to turn the key.
    Even in the dream I thought, no problem, I just call a locksmith. But dammit, it wanted to be a nightmare, so I got scared. Realizing in my sleep that it wasn't a scary situation, I got scared anyway. As ever, the suspicion was and is that it was all a plot to get me up to go to the bathroom. And when I woke, I found I needed to. WHY can't my brain just introduce a character as in Total Recall to show and tell me I ought to get up and go wee? I know, it didn't end that well in Total Recall. But still!

Getting less crazy

    Nobody who knows me would believe it, but this is actually me being less crazy. The gluten-free, casein-free, soy-free experiment has generally been a success. I used to be in a panic whenever I had to drive in any kind of traffic at all; that's all gone away. Though I'm still no social butterfly, I'm much more easygoing in social situations than ever before. Agoraphobia has gone away except in really really big crowds.
    The problem is that greater comfort in interpersonal relations means that there are more frequent interpersonal relations, and unfortunately I suck spectacularly at these in their every form. I'm like a free radical in the body social, doing a lot of damage without trying. I desperately need to rein in my poisonous tendencies and try to spread only sweetness and light, or anyway minimize the darkness. Or maybe the Trappists would be glad to welcome me.

Why disappointed?

    I just noticed how weird this word is. Admittedly I could look it up, but efforts to do so just led to a lot of popups. All I can guess about it is that the words appointed and disappointed must have diverged a pretty fur piece somewhere along the line over the centuries. All I got out of the etymology search apart from popups was that the root word appoint comes from Middle French, but not what it meant.
    I guess the best I can get out of it is that the appointment part has to do with expectations and so disappointment means disillusion in failed expectations. But it seems like an amazing stretch. Doesn't it?

Southbound

    I think it's odd that the glare I was complaining about the other day when out driving is much the worst when I'm going southwards. This doesn't make a lot of sense since in the Northern hemisphere, the one place I know the sun isn't going to be is north of me. It seems like the bigger problem should be when I'm northbound, but it isn't. I don't even need my sunglasses when I'm going that way, but I always do when heading south. This isn't the glare directly from the sun (which is only killing when it's late afternoon and I'm heading west, of course) but the reflection off of other cars, usually rear windshields and trunks. Color me puzzled.

Gold

    There was a lot of talk some years ago (and a movie) about blood diamonds, but events in South Africa are making me think about blood gold. When miners are shot down by security people (I forget whether they were official police or working for the company; betting on the latter) and other miners are arrested for it, it might be time to start thinking about how society can celebrate marriage, say, without supporting repulsive and immoral corporate behavior.
    The value of gold is such that going into the vintage jewelry business would be cost prohibitive. Judging by radio ads, there are a lot of folks in the business of buying old jewelry to melt it down and a lot who are interested in selling it for that purpose. I guess it would be necessary to educate Americans further about how much pain goes into making their pretty jewelry so that people would value recycled gold more than newly mined gold.
    I am also reminded of those pictures of silver mines in South America, where the workers look like ants crawling all over one another. I guess what I'm asking is where would one find ethical jewelry if gold, silver and diamonds are out? It's not like I'm ever at this point likely to need a wedding ring myself. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who would rather consecrate their love with something that won't make them feel guilty every time they look at it. Or maybe I think too much.

Donating

    I need to donate my body to science. The hard part is being allowed to keep using it. The reason I think science needs me is that I'm firmly convinced that I am celiac. However, my immediate family is equally convinced that none of them are. Howeverever, at least one of them should be, statistically (not, you know, morally) speaking. So the question is if I'm celiac, how did I get that way?
    I always thought that celiacs are born that way, but my more recent reading indicates that it's a condition that you are born with a tendency towards but that you develop it some time in your life. I certainly always had digestive problems, but the first solid indication that there was something wrong was creeping pins and needles sensations that hit in my 30s. Later the lactose intolerance that got me in my 40s was another indication. A better one was when both went away when I quit gluten.
    I eat a very restrictive diet now, but just because I didn't do so before is not to say that I was ever what you would call normal. I used to go quite the other way regarding gluten. I ate (wheat) bran flakes every morning for a decade or more. I pretty much lived at Cici's Pizza for a similar stretch of time. And I used to snack on four slices of whole wheat bread pretty frequently in the evening. What I'm wondering, I guess, is if I could have triggered an autoimmune response to gluten simply by overdosing on the stuff. What do you say Science? Interested?

Dr. Scholl's

    An oddity, and a very poor advertisement. Something less than ten years ago, I was trying to get started on a second edition of our hiking book. (This wound up being done by somebody else entirely, because first I and then John never quite got around to it. Sic transit gloria mundi.) I had trouble proceeding mostly because my car in those days was unbelievably unreliable.
    But there was an odd smaller problem. Any time I went as far as a mile, I would get a small but significant pain in my hips. Unfortunately, on a hiking book you have to go as far as a mile many times over. Anyway, as I say, it was mainly car troubles (and, OK, laziness) that caused me to abandon the effort, and eventually I found that I could again hike more than a mile with no hip soreness.
    In the last couple of weeks, the hip thing came back. One difference between now and hiking book days is that I use Dr. Scholl's orthotics in my shoes and boots. Specifically, I use the one that's supposed to help lower back pain. The ones in my boots through this week had been there a long time, much longer than the recommended three-four monthes. So I got a new set, and the hip soreness after short hikes went away again. So why do I call it a poor advertisement? Lower back still hurts. Paging Dr. Scholl!

WHEN I'm President...

    Another political one, but mainly a usage nitpick. At last night's debate (and probably at the other ones), Governor Romney said several times, "When I'm elected President..." The first time, he undercut it badly by starting with, "If I'm elected President," and then correcting himself to "WHEN." I think the Governor might have benefited from further coaching in English usage before leaving his home planet. The preferred approach would be, "As President, I would..." That way, you convey exactly the same concept without looking like a douchebag. Of course, if you are in fact a douchebag (or a space alien), you may have to practice a lot in order to learn how to talk like an actual human being. That is not for me to say. Do you think Ann will talk after the election?

The plural of A

    A while ago I was blithering about the baseball team The A's and the band The A's, to the effect that I was glad that this was actually a contraction with the apostrophe taking the place of "thletic" (and with the idea that the band was/were named after the team) because I get mad (as in kookoo) when plurals are formed using apostrophe s. (Of course, now I have to go look up how one should write "apostrophe s.":))
    Then I thought back to those glorious days when they stopped marking penmanship and I therefore started getting straight-- uh, whatever the plural of A is. Because, though I believe that this should be As, I am aware that there is already such a word. Of course, you could go with "Ays," but most people would read that as if it were "aye" and think you were doing a pirate impression. (Straight Arrrrrrrrrs.)
    So I think I'll just say that I made straight the plural of A, and conclude that I have found the source of the problem. The problem is English. It's all fouled up. Isn't that right, Fonzie? "Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!" (I used that gag already, didn't I? OK, so sue me.)

All about the Pentiums

    A long time ago, Puff Daddy made a record called "All About the Benjamins." Shortly thereafter, Al Yankovic did a parody called "All About the Pentiums." I saw the video for the latter and thought that it was nice that Al was doing something original. I didn't know about the Puff Daddy record; hell, I didn't know that "all about the benjamins" was a catchphrase. (If I had, I'd probably assume that it was about Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss.)
    Alice used to tease me about this. There was once a headline in The Onion along the lines of "Area Man Recognizes No Pop Culture References After 1988." She said that it was about me. I had to say, "Fair enough."

Evaporated cane juice

    For some time, a minor pet peeve of mine has been when health foods list "evaporated cane juice" instead of sugar. Because that's what sugar IS, right? But NOOOOOOOOOOOO. The other day, I saw evaporated cane juice for sale in a store. Apparently, the difference is in level of refinement. Operationally, this mostly means that sugar is bleached and evaporated cane juice isn't.
    Somebody at NPr blogged about this just yesterday http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163098211/evaporated-cane-juice-sugar-in-disguise (clearly, I'm slipping), saying that a lady in California is suing a yogurt company for calling sugar evaporated cane juice. So there are worse things for the industry than making me peevish.
    It just makes me think that the people using the term need to give their customers a little credit. Since everybody knows that sugar = evaporated cane juice (or at least everybody likely to be buying ostensibly healthy foods), you'd think that manufacturers using the term would also put some language on the package saying how evaporated cane juice differs from table sugar. For a long time, I wouldn't buy anything with evaporated cane juice in the ingredient list for just this reason, i.e., the "Do they think I'm an idiot?" reason. Eventually I got over it. And I'm not suing. But I won't be sad if the yogurt company loses.

Jingles

    For some reason, as much as I hate dumb locally-produced non-musical radio commercials is exactly how much I love dumb locally-produced musical ones. Apparently, bad rhymes + trite music = laugh riot in my little mind. Current favorite: "For appliances with reliances/ that's Jeffers-McGill!" But there are so many. Somehow, little cities like this seem to have a knack for producing unbelievably cheesy jingles. As a big plus, they manage to sound excited about stuff that nobody could possibly be excited about. Comedy gold!
    Updating yesterday, I have my bathtub no-slide decals and have actually cleaned the bathtub. It is still air-drying at the moment, but I'll be applying the stickers momentarily. I got through my shower this morning without any sliding; hopefully, my slippin' and slidin' days are over.

Slick

    In the shower this morning, I slid the length of the bathtub somehow without losing my balance. (OK, maybe a little. But I didn't fall at least.) It was the nightmare of the person living alone. I'm glad it ended well. As it happened, the other day at Publix I found the no-slip decals I had been looking for for eons. I think it's fair to say that the plastic bath mat (or rather, its suction cups) is(/are) inadequate. I think I'll be picking up those decals the next time I'm in Publix, and then installing them. Or, ya know, go back to tub baths.
    Meanwhile in dreamland, I had another one of those dreams that announced itself as a recurring one. I'm not quite sure how this works. As a rule, if a dream announces itself as a dream at all, you wind up waking up. This is usually the case in nightmares and as I've said before this mainly seems to happen with me when I need to pee. In this dream, I was in what was supposed to be my parents' house except that it was in Los Angeles. The ostensibly recurring part was that my room had a floor that would periodically rise up to the ceiling, making navigation more than a little tricky. The recurring part was a certain sense that I remembered this from before.
    I wonder if this is how we learn to make memories. As a little kid, you just receive information and only gradually learn to sort out what's new from what you've heard or seen before. This is why little kids always think that they have made up old jokes, even ones somebody just told them the day before. (In my heart of hearts, I STILL think I made up, "Take my wife--PLEASE!") I wonder if recurring dreams have some role in teaching you how to learn how to form memories. It would be nice to think that they're useful for something.:)

Pard

    When I was small, neighbors up the street had a dog named Pard. He was black and white and tiny. I think I was told back then that he was a bulldog, but Internet image searches indicate that he was more likely a Boston terrier. I was terrified of all dogs back then, but Pard was so small that he was not very threatening. He would growl at you, but even that was more endearing than scary.
    I mention him mainly because Amelia the cat has assorted growls and harrumphs that remind me of Pard's. Of course, she is also black and white and tiny. Perhaps she's part Boston terrier.

Autumn

    I am not generally a pro-autumn person. One would think that getting up to this ridiculously advanced age, I ought to start getting pro-autumn as a sort of sympathy strike, but one would be mistaken. However, this autumn has been so insanely beautiful so far that I have to give it some thought. Endless blue skies, comfortable but not crisp temperatures-- it's been crazy. A Chamber of Commerce day, every day.
    It makes me think that one day I'm going to have to live in a desert. (Or a dessert. I'm not picky.) Apparently, I cheer up a lot the less clouds that are around. I am assured that after a while, I'll be aching for rain, any rain, to come a-calling. But I think I might be willing to take that chance.
    I'm scared to jinx anything, but since the latest rescheduling of Dad's dialysis time, waits are a thing of the past. Of course, they just scheduled him for the time that they were just getting him in late for before, and it cuts into my lunchtime exactly as much as before. But he doesn't have to get ready unnecessarily early nor does he have to wait so long. So I'm ready to call it a win.

Here comes that rainy day feeling again

    I'm going to get killed for sharing that earworm, aren't I? Long long ago in the early '70s there was a British singing group called The Fortunes. They had a massive hit with the song in the subject line, and a few followup hits as well. As a small fry, I had the 45 for the big hit and one of the followups, but not for another number called "Storm in a Teacup," which my memory says that I liked better. So yesterday I looked up "Storm in a Teacup" on YouTube.
    I literally couldn't believe it. The chord progressions were childish and the refrain was apparently forgettable, since I had completely forgotten it. I remembered a couple of verses and that was about it. Seemingly, my brain had just ripped out the verses that I liked and plopped them down in "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again." (Weather-obsessed much, fellas?) Kind of a freaky memory trick, I thought. Granted, my brain had 40 years to work with, but I'm pretty sure this happened within a year or so, because I was absolutely set-in-stone sure that I knew how the song goes. But of course I can always blame the transistor radios of the era.:)
    Coincidentally, it's supposed to be raining today, but so far isn't. The only rainy day feeling I've had so far is sinus problems, but that was yesterday when it changed from sunny to cloudy. It does, however, always seem to be a Monday.

No hope, radio

    It turns out to be very liberating to lose your last particles of hope. I actually feel better than I have in ages and a little, I dunno, ferocious. It was decades ago when I worked out the simple formula that while all hope is in vain, the only thing more foolish than hope is hopelessness. Apparently I've decided to just say "screw it" and carry on. For whatever reason (largely due to the beautiful weather no doubt), spirits are blithe.
    Looking up the phrase "no soap, radio" trying to find the definitive punctuation, I learned from IMDb that there was briefly a TV series by that name thirty years ago. Very briefly. Briefer than "Police Squad!" very briefly. It starred Steve Guttenberg and featured not only Stuart Pankin but also Edie McClurg. Five episodes has to be thought of as miraculous, considering. The interesting thing is that it has an IMDb score of 7.8. Now, there were only 23 voters, and it's possible that they were all Steve Guttenberg. Just struck me as improbably that there are even that many rabid "No Soap, Radio" fans running around all these years later.
    Dreams last night were frankly alarming. I had had my head cut off and reattached for some reason. In the logic of the dream (such as it is), it might have made some degree of sense if I had had it attached to somebody else's body, but that didn't seem to be the case. So for some reason my head was sewn to my neck and then later I was going to have it reattached more permanently. The worst thing is that it was one of those where I didn't realize I was dreaming. Very relieved to wake up with everything securely connected. Playing soft music at sleepytime proves once again not to be such a sharp idea.

Ten years

    Almost ten years ago, I posted on Democratic Underground that I thought there was a lot more glare from the sun than there used to be. An online friend from New York agreed. I appreciate that this is almost the weakest possible anecdotal evidence, but it made me feel better that I wasn't the only one to feel that way.
    My feelings haven't changed. I have to wear sunglasses over my glasses to drive most days. The worst is the reflection off the trunks of other cars. The glare gets better after it rains, but usually only for one day. I can readily accept the idea that I'm becoming photophobic with age; only problem is that I was always photophobic. I could never sleep if there was any light anywhere. I would sleep with my head under the covers or under the pillow. Only in relatively recent years have I found sturdy sleep masks that will do the job. Until then, I was only really happy in hotel rooms with blackout curtains.
    Somehow, I got by driving for decades without being blinded by glare, though. I wonder if it's something that catalytic converters put out. Or that they don't quite succeed at taking out. As I recall, they were mandated with the idea of reducing smog. So maybe they reduce smog, but still release enough particles to create this infernal glare. I guess I should be glad I don't live in an actual big city.

The baboon and the horse

    Last night's dreaming was bizarre by any standards. I was living with Alice again, though we were no longer in a relationship. She wasn't even there, but somehow I intuited the backstory. I had my own room, which was well-appointed. This was lucky, since I was besieged there by a baboon and a horse. Apparently, the baboon wanted to eat the horse. Alice had made a bet that she had to keep the baboon and the horse in her house for a month. Presumably, they both were to be alive at the end of the month. I was just relieved that the Monkey (my cat, not the baboon) was in the room with me.
    THIS is why you should never eat cookies after 10 pm!:)

Earwitness

    The State Fair is in town up the block from where I live, making navigation somewhat more challenging. Yesterday it opened and my dad needed me to take him on an errand. The trip was problem free until I was on my way home. Fair traffic clogged one lane of Rosewood Drive. Fortunately I was in the other lane. I saw a vehicle in the congested lane hit the brakes, but was past and could no longer see by the time the person behind him hit his own brakes too late and hit the first vehicle, too.
    I had no idea how to proceed. In the strictest sense I was a witness and was required to stay. However, I was definitely not an eyewitness, and could not in fact say anything about the accident or who caused it. The fond hope is that it was like my own fender non-bender of last week or so and there was no damage and no injury. Regardless, criminal that I am, I just drove on. There was no convenient place to stop so I would have had to block the still-viable lane if I had stopped. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

The Yays

    Had to get this in while they're still in the playoffs. The other week, listening to sports results on the radio, I heard The Yays instead of The A's. I think it's a big improvement. I never liked the name The A's because it looks like they made a plural by adding an apostrophe s. Actually, the apostrophe is for the lost "thletic," but still. There was once a Philly band, enormously popular there in the '70s and early '80s, using the same name. They might have done the apostrophe s plural, or they may have been named after the baseball team. The Athletics, after all, started in Philadelphia.
    Of course it begs the question how would I form the plural if I had more than one A. After all, "As" is already a word. Beats me; I'd probably go with As anyway. My brother once saw the band The A's in Boston; they introduced themselves by saying, "We're the f---in' A's!" (which might be the real reason they chose the name). So maybe I'll ask the f===in' A's. Or maybe I would just go with the yays. It's certainly cheerful!

Gender reassignment

    Last night, for the first time ever I think, I dreamed I was female. There wasn't much point to it in the sense that the character I represented in the dream could have been either gender. It mainly shows that you shouldn't read suspense before you go to bed. I was in a showdown with another woman. Strangely, it was all over the phone. Strangerly, I somehow managed to shoot myself in the foot. This demonstrates that as a woman, I would be EXACTLY the same, since that's already the story of my life.
    Early I dreamed that the radio had named me as the world's greatest guitar player. I had the radio on fairly loud in real life; I can only imagine that the sports talk radio host had for some reason mentioned the worldn't greatest guitar player and my dreaming mind had weaseled my name in there somehow. I was fairly tickled about it, both in my sleep and later when I woke up.

Days of future passed

    Paul and I were talking about science fiction or otherwise futurist or futuristic stories set in a future that has already passed by. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" sort of leaps to mind, but there are a lot of others. We thought that "A Clockwork Orange" had happened already; though Wikipedia is non-specific, if it was near-future in 1961, as Wiki says, one can assume that it's past by now.
    Boy, this is turning out to be harder than I thought. I know there was a Star Trek episode where they returned in time to the 1980s or '90s, but I forget which. I was surprised that "Brave New World" was set so far in the future, though I guess I should have remembered the whole After Ford gag. Most of my old-time radio sci fi is set in a future that's happened already, but since most of it is also pretty obscure, there probably isn't much point into going into specifics. Some of them are from "The Martian Chronicles," which definitely start in 1999. So there.

Not old school, just old

    I just noticed that my shaving mug is a plastic Amoco coffee cup from that special time when gas stations were still giving away premiums (premia?), but they were really crappy. It's probably from high school, a long time before Amoco got swallowed up by BP, itself a fairly long time ago. And it would be fun to claim that I'm being old school using a shaving brush and mug, the mug advertising a company that went out of existence years ago. But really I'm just old. Though I wasn't when I started, being about 12 then. So maybe I'm both. Why, I remember having to walk through snow ten feet deep to get my shaving soap! Or some damn thing.
    Shouldn't have bragged about my nightmares getting gentler. Not that last night's was particularly brutal. But I was lost in yet another gigantic building which sometimes was a mansion and sometimes was a shopping mall and I had to find my dad and also I had to rewrite my masters thesis and get a number of recommendation by mail all in one day in order to save the world. Not much pressure there! Even in my sleep, I thought it was pretty funny.

Boy, nightmares are getting a lot gentler

    Last night I dreamed that I was out of blackberry preserves. Also that somebody had given me a beer. I told him I can't really drink that anymore. Horrifying nightmares!
    The person who gave me a beer was someone who in real life has had a rather disappointing, uh, real life. In the dream, he had gotten into the movie business and was going to find jobs for everybody in my family there. And he gave me a cider along with the beer. So that leaves the blackberry preserves.
    Yeah, I know, not much of a blog entry. But after boring people with my nightmares for all this time, it's a joy sharing one that is so very not nightmary. Also I thought it was funny.
    Real life this morning was almost as weird, as my toothbrush tasted terrible! I was starting to suspect the small companion of having peed on it, but it appears that it had somehow landed in some handsoap. I've been urpy and uncomfortable all morning in spite of not having swallowed whatever was on the toothbrush. But I suspect I'll live. Hopefully I won't dream about it.:)

Is McDonald's abdicating their childrearing responsibilities?

    I don't know about where you live, but in this town, two of the McDonald's restaurants or stores or whatever they're calling them now have been torn down in order to be replaced in exactly the same place. One of these locations already had this happen once in the last 15 years or so, which seems doubly weird.
    The new stores or restaurants or whatever don't seem large enough to have an indoor children's play area. I might be mistaken of course, but I wonder if McDonald's is going out of the daycare business. A cursory glance around the Internets indicates that there have been lawsuits about the lack of cleanliness in the play areas. I guess it might be that they decided there's more risk than payoff. Or it might be to do with the locations themselves; one is downtown while the other is next to the fort. Perhaps they don't think there are any kids there.
    I stress that the concern about McDonald's abdicating their responsibilities is entirely tongue-in-cheek, though I AM curious. I seem to recall a Paul Reiser movie about divorced dads that largely revolved around the McDonald's play area. (The movie, not the dads.) I'm not sure that it would be a bad thing for McDonald's to stop having play areas, or for that matter a good thing. But if it stops future Paul Reiser movies, well, I'm all in favor of that.:)

Bad luck

    I lost a collar stay that had been on my kitchen counter, so I started scouting around the area for it. On the floor in the gap between the counter and the refrigerator was something that looked like a nutmeg. As it was a very narrow gap, it took a while to find an instrument long enough and thin enough to get the mystery object out, but my longest stirring spoon in the end did the job.
    It turned out to be the elephant from an elephant keychain that the owner of Mai Thai restaurant gave me almost four years ago. I was living with Alice then. Since the keychain was cute and pretty, I offered it to her. She declined it, saying that since the elephant's trunk was down, it was bad luck. A few weeks later, she dumped me and threw me out. So I guess she was right.

Sorting awe from awful

    A friend came over last week and was the first person to comment on my Grand Canyon pictures. Many years ago I went to the Grand Canyon with a pocket camera. In those days, a major delight of my life was making panoramic pictures by taking a series of shots from one vantage point, panning usually from left to right. When I got home and had them printed, I arranged them on what is basically extra-long sheets of photo album paper. She was mortified that they weren't properly laminated, and only relieved when she heard that I still have the negatives, thus they could still be reprinted and laminated.
    When I was younger, up to about 20 years ago, I listened to a lot of vinyl. Most of it was bought used, or had been heavily used already by me over the years. Thus, there were a lot of snaps, crackles and pops. They never bothered me; I could always sort out the music from the noise. Many people have suggested that I get better stereo equipment or position my speakers for ideal stereo imaging. I could never get the point; I think that's what the brain is for.
    Maybe that's my skill: I can sort the awe from the awful, genuflecting a bit at the former without being overly troubled by the latter. I think there's too much joy in life to let the little things bug you.

Hot mess

    I was trying to make a new version of pizza-free pizza. This one rests on the premise that the commercially prepared gluten-free (GF) pizza crusts made from potato and brown rice only were pretty good, and my flatbread made from potato and kale only was pretty good, so I ought to be able to make a potato and brown rice crust. Well sort of.
    I boiled a half a cup of brown rice, which probably yielded about a cup and a half. I baked four small red potatoes, forking them pretty good first and then wrapping them all in one piece of aluminum foil, for an hour at 350 degrees. I rinsed off and peeled the potatoes and dumped them on a sheet of parchment paper on a pizza pan. I preheated the oven to 400 degrees (which is as high as you can go with parchment paper), dumped the rice on top of the potatoes and set to mashing. When everything was mashalicious, I sprinkled some EV olive oil on top (because it's even grosser to the touch without doing so) and spread the potato rice mix out until it nearly filled the pan. (It's a bit hard to tell with the paper in between.)
    I tried 15 minutes, but it was still too soft. I tried another 15 minutes and it was firmer, so I ran with that. In the end, it wasn't too crust-like, so maybe next time I'll go for a total of 40 minutes at 400. Or maybe I won't; more below.
    I had bought what was supposed to be a poblano pepper, but given how hard it tried to kill me, it must have actually been a jalapeno. I sauteed a sweet onion and the pepper, also in EV olive oil, for ten minutes. I had also soaked and cooked a 1/3 cup (dry) of Great Northern beans, yielding about a cup. I also steamed a bunch of kale. And I had bought unsalted tomato sauce. I didn't mean to, but I didn't salt anything. At all. And it turned out fabulous. Just crazy kookoo wonderful.
    (Edit: I forgot to mention that I cooked it another 10 minutes at 400 with the sauce and toppings. Also that there wasn't any cheese, not even the fake kind. It just didn't need it.)
    Now it wasn't much like a pizza. The crust didn't cohere and wasn't crusty. I pretty much had to eat it with a knife and fork. Even I, reading it back, can hardly believe that pepper and onion, kale and beans on a potato and brown rice crust would be anything but boring, but it wasn't; it was brilliant. So I failed at reinventing the pizza. But I'm a champion at creating a wonderful hot mess.

Talking about the weather

    It's interesting because it isn't interesting. Rather, it's so commonplace that it's surprising that it can still be so interesting. We're having a stretch of cool, overcast weather. It just misses being gloomy except insofar as it gets dark so early for this latitude and this time of year. I had to do some banking and was talking about it with my teller and all the tellers, really. And that's the point: talking about the weather is such a trite feature of small talk, but just throw in one little bit of weirdness (in this case, the shift a few years ago of the changeover from daylight savings to standard time to a month later) and suddenly you have a conversational barnburner. Well, I thought it was really neat.
    In less fun news, Dad had some tissue removed for a biopsy at the dermatologist the other week. Unfortunately, it turned out to be cancerous. He's scheduled for a procedure to remove the cancerous tissue in 3 weeeks. Presumably, this indicates nothing pressing or life-threatening. So there's that.