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.