Sunday evening viewing pleasure

Turned out to be a warmish day here on the beautiful southern Oregon coast, got up into the 90's. C'mon where is the evening breeze when you really need it?

I forget to watch "The Amazing Race 13" until it was about half over; they had the usual mixture of couples,the hippy couple with very long shaggy, very white hair came in last after climbing down an almost 300 foot cargo rope. I think that part of Brazil was gorgeous. Felt sorry for the gal exhorting her partner to speak some Spanish to the cab driver. Um, sorry Brazil speaks Portuguese, Obrigado.

Gas prices and turkey veggie meatballs

As you can see, the price of gasoline dropped in the last couple of days. Roseburg gas is running a good ten cents per gallon CHEAPER but then it is a 90 mile drive one way for that way cheap gas. And of course I could take my gas discount coupon from the Safeway here, drive 20 miles to Coos Bay for a savings of what was that, 3 cents?




I have been jonesing for some home made meatballs. Yesterday I jacked a recipe from the net and made 80 beef meatballs consisting of 3 lbs ground beef, 1/2 cup shredded Parm, 2 eggs, 1 cup bread crumbs, 1/2 cup chopped carrots, 1/2 cup chopped zucchini, 1/2 cup chopped green onions, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper, 2 tbsp garlic, shape into 1 1/2 inch size balls bake in 400 degree oven for 15 minutes.

Today, since I had LOTS of left over carrots, onion and zucchini, I purchased an additional three pounds of ground turkey and made another 80 meatballs, same recipe. Texture is a bit more bouncy and not quite as flavorful as the beef meatballs but they will do in a pinch with pasta and spaghetti sauce.

Oh yeah, PRODUCT REVIEW; I have a very nice heavy duty stand mixer for which numerous attachments can be purchased to make pasta, sausages etc. I purchased a food grinder attachment. I read the directions printed in three languages on how to attach the thing.

I plugged it in and manfully ground up the rest of my carrots. Good god what a mess! First of all there is no way to drain off all the juice created unless you tip the whole 15 pound thing out over the sink. I had itty bitty pieces of carrot EVERY damn where. I was worse than when my blender came apart after having blended a gallon of ingredients for flan. Yuck! Ick! Did that stop me?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo.....I tried grinding the zucchini, then the onion and then some MORE carrots! I finally had to stop, take the thing apart and disassemble in order to get the remainder of the ground carrots out of the thing.

True, I did have a nice handy several cups full of ground veggies to use in my meatball recipe. But it was a firetruckin' mess. I am stained orange in places that I would not ordinarily be stained.

I have concluded that it would have been much quicker to drag out the blender, toss in a cup of water, blend the carrots, drain the water, voila done in 45 seconds.

I have written myself instructions on the inside lid of the mixer attachment box, in three languages just in case!!

Oh wait... why didn't I use the food processor? I do have a mini one and I did grind up the first zucchini successfully and after that it refused to work any more...which is why I rather smugly assembled the mixer attachment, see paragraph four. I shall note the same directions in three languages for the mini food processor as well.

BOOK REPORT

"A DANCE THROUGH TIME" By Lynn Kurland.

Set in the present day, erstwhile writer, Elizabeth Smith, lives in Manhattan and is just THIS close to finishing her novel when she begins to hear voices. The voice is of her dream man, a Scottish laird, tall, handsome, scowling. "Come Elizabeth!". She panics and leaves the apartment to go sit on her favorite park bench. When she awakens from her nap,she finds herself in 14th century Scotland and the adventure begins. She survives being pitched into the pit of Laird Jamie Macleod because he thinks she is a witch having come from the forest. He won't allow women in his keep, but eventually they marry and it becomes important that they find their way through the forest and back to the 20th century.

This is the first in a series of books set thus, some mix times, some do not but they are all very readable. There is even a couple three romances between ghosts and living persons,who all manage to master the time gates and go save his or her man from their ghostly fate.

I WANT one!!!!

This is a Qpod Sport. It is a very cute alternative to scooters and SUV's. I saw a review of this vehicle on Top Gear on BBC America. Very cute! The driver reported that technically it is a quad bike but much more comfortable,two seater,roll bar, a single stroke something or other gas engine, top speed 45 mph, completely street legal in the UK!!! It costs about 5000 pounds British Sterling (that's 10K US dollars at present). I googled Qpod and found all sorts of dealerships in the UK, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nothing in USA. Oh, and you can purchase all sorts of upgrades, doors and a roof for one thing would be ideal in rainy Oregon. Gee I wish someone would open a dealership. I don't want to have to look for one on Ebay.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MITCH!!!!

I went to bed last night mentally envisioning where the very ripe banana was sitting. I was thinking that I would mash the pulp and mix it into the pancake batter rather than slice and pour batter over the fruit. I woke up about 6:30 and went downstairs,the banana was not lying on top of the stove and had already been consumed. Drat! On to Plan B.



So I rumbled through the drawers in the fridge and found bacon and new potatoes. I oiled the potatoes and baked everything in a 350 degree oven for about 25 minutes.



Still didn't have a recipe in mind but decided the taters would need some onion. I sauteed half of a large sweet onion. When the bacon and potatoes were done I pulled them out, drained the bacon and coarse chopped the potatoes.



I combined everything in a casserole baking dish and added 4 beaten eggs, 1/2 cup of shredded parmesan cheese and half a can of halved black olives.




I baked it in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes.




I brewed a cup of Constant Comment tea, two Splenda packets, toasted two slices of hazelnut bread, spread home make freezer blackberry jam, and some FRITTATA on my plate. Again, Happy 50th Birthday, Mitch!!!!

Yeah, we are back to this....

Today is September 16, 2008. Several things have happened within the past week that should have driven the price of gas either up or down as follows:

1. Hurricane Ike shut down 25% of the oil refineries in Texas.

2. The financial meltdown of Freddie McMortgage and Fannie McWhatever.

3. Price of oil has dropped from 140 dollars per barrel to around 90 dollars.

4. AIG got bailed out to the tune of 85 Billion (with a B) dollars.

5. Somewhere,there is a shit storm of butterfly's flapping their wings like CRAZY.

Just a shadow picture

Snapped this picture this morning. I watched OVTV today and they had a program about various people discussing what is art and what is not art. I would like to think that this picture of shadows of the Pink Ladies growing by my front door would constitute art if I enlarged the photo, framed it appropriately, hung it in a gallery and charged many dollars to purchase it.

However the arguments ranged far and wide. One artist takes found objects, writes a story about them and displays them in iconographic, reliquary type items. Very interesting, you can stroll up to a very elaborate display and suddenly perceive that the miniature white South West New Mexico church steeple contains a large bottle of hair product.

Then the critics would wade in and sneer about how this is not art. There were several examples given and several more sneers. Very entertaining.

I always thought art was in the eye of the beholder. I don't like tapestries of dogs playing poker, but some people just love it. Oh, I guess personal taste would factor in there somehow.

So what is your favorite art piece? The Mona Lisa? Jackson Pollack? Gimme a jingle.

A SMALL CHALLENGE

1. What is/are haricot vert?

2. How is it pronounced?

Just askin'.

ONE WEEK LATER

It's one week later and my tightly furled roses are opening up and they smell wonderful, I shall change the water and add plant food and clip the stems and take another picture in a week, probably gonna be pretty ugly by then.

Today was my day off, it was lovely and sunny here, my coding buddy and I went to lunch at the Chinese place. I ordered prawns and fried rice. Yummy!

The price of gas has not dropped so being down to a half a tank, I filled up for exactly $22.22. Good poker hand.

I shopped a bit and came home and picked four cups of very large, sweet blackberries.
I decided to make freezer jam. Reading the directions on the box of Pectin, I sugared my berries and added some lemon juice and let that sit for ten minutes.
In a separate pan I boiled the pectin in water and poured that over the berries and stirred for three minutes. I then filled four 18 ounce plastic containers for freezer jam. There were a couple tablespoons left over so I spread it on a toasted buttered bagel. Jeez, good stuff. Hope the jam sets over night.

Woke from a very odd working dream

I woke this morning from a dream in which I was sitting in a fairly large lawyers' office. There were several lawyers and a judge going over material for a case. The case involved some sort of alcohol related injury. They had called in me and another person to help them with the coding. I was looking through a very fat book sized code book that had been all neatly tabbed with injury diagnoses. Under each heading were all the alcohol related codes. In the non dream world, no such book exists. I remember commenting so to the other person who came with me. The other person was the Marketing Director for the hospital, who as far as I know does only marketing social type stuff. Weird. At one point we were discussing a tricky point of coding and I suggested that we look at the coding guidelines to give strength to our argument about what ever the heck we were arguing about. The coding guidelines book turned out to be in a huge yellow book and I commented that the guidelines usually consisted of about 25 pages located in the front of the ICD9-CM code book. I then looked around and there was a very large shelf of code books all from the same vendor being used by this law office as reference books. At this point I think I woke up from pure boredom.

I know from consulting the dream site previously that dreaming about work in general means frustration or some darn thing. Jeez, frustrated and bored. I think I will go read a more intersting book, wash three loads, meet my coding buddy for lunch and do some bidness. There I think I captured all the elements of my dream. Erk.

Third time is the charm, consumer advocacy, glass finger nail file

I had nearly resigned myself to NOT receiving the third replacement of the smaller, more fragile, easily broken glass finger nail file. Knock, knock, knock upon my door about 7 pm, the brown trucking company dropped off this nice sturdy package.





Well looky here ... it is an UNBROKEN glass finger nail file and yes, it does file rather nicely. I guess the copy of my blog I enclosed last time may have convinced them to change the package. Thank you Budk Knife Store.

Happy Birthday Mom

Just in case anyone managed to successfully block it out, Sunday is Mom's 82nd birthday. She does get around in her scooter for some shopping at the large corporate grocery store. She continues to rely heavily upon local family members for transportation to the pharmacy and doctors appointments and to the lab for blood tests and she is truly thankful, honest.

Virginia is the youngest of six children, the first child, a boy, died at birth. They were all raised in Colorado until they moved by train and car from Colorado to Emmett, Idaho in the mid to late 30's. 1937 I think.

They lived in several places until finding the place out west of town. I have fond memories of that place; mostly Grandma Horn's pies but I digress.

Virginia had to quit school after 8th grade gradation. Her father refused to let her continue high school. She actually lived in town for a while,boarded with a lady whose family owned one of the down town stores. She met Dad and they married in 1945and lived in a very tiny trailer house. I was the first child of seven. Mom was busy and worked hard at cooking and cleaning, Dad was busy and worked hard to support the family.

Mom and Dad loved to go dancing. I remember attending dances at Ola,the kind where you brought your potluck cake or sandwiches, pitched in at midnight to pay for the piano player and the other musicians. If you wanted a drink you went out side and took a pull from the jug in the car. Drinking was not allowed in the dance hall.

I also learned how to play pinochle from Mom and Dad and was even privileged enough to be invited to pinochle parties when I was much older.

So take a minute and give a thought and if your mother's birth day is Sunday, September 7, give her a call and wish her happy birthday.

Price of Gas and Pink Ladies

As you can see the price of gasoline has dropped a whole whopping six cents per gallon. My summer purchase of $4.20 per gallon is sitting in the basement in the 5 gallon gas can. This is not something that can be banked. Will have to recycle that fuel soon, however we do have two gas mowers that are presently in working condition.



These lily type flowers just bloomed, September seems an odd time of year to get blooms but these just sneak in every year, not much greenery goes with these but perhaps First Nations can put the proper taxonomy to them when she gets back from vacation.

Happy early Birthday to meeeeeee

Oooh aren't they pretty?? Received lovely bouquet delivered today. Following instructions, put packet of flower food in water in vase, cut one inch off each stem and lovingly inserted each of the two dozen roses, they are various colors and they smell wonderful. Decided to light the candles on the mantle for the effect. Nice,huh? Thank you, Darling Man.

Messes, magic lanterns and magnets.

What a mess, I can't find my necklaces in all this jumble, especially the magnetic clasp ones without dragging out a rats nest of sparklies.




Oh, look, there is a metal lamp right beside my bed.




Ah much better...must restrain myself from putting magnets on the other stuff. Lamp may eventually fall over and NO it does not in any way resemble the lighting found in Houses of Ill Repute, so there!