New art work

Today the auxiliary put up new art work, all photography.
This little beauty is a photo mounted on canvas.  It is gorgeous, NOT FOR SALE and the only thing that would make it better is if the pears were actually dripping juice.  I love still life this is all dark and moody like an old master.  Yumm!  Other artists have lovely nature shots of birds, trees, but give me a bowl of fruit any time.

Now let me describe lunch today. It being Halloween, dietary really got into the spirit of things.  We had beef stew inside a hollowed pumpkin, quite delicious.  The biscuits were lovely and light. There was green salad with cockroaches made of dates stuffed with cream cheese.   There was some nice green brain cottage cheese salad. The brown and black worms were made of jello.   There was an unappetizing serving of poopy diaper dip.  And the piece de resistance was the dog logs made of crispy rice cereal, very dark brown chocolate and candy corn.  Thank god they forgot to make the kitty litter cake.  The pumpkin contest had one outstanding entry, Beth in the business office sacrificed several hundred paper clips to make a very complex paisley pattern on the pumpkin, very pretty. I should have taken a picture of that, too. 

Um happy birth little 7th billion

Today is apparently the day that the seven BILLIONTH human will be born on this planet.
Apparently 1000 years ago, there were 300 million people in the entire world.  That is roughly the population of the USA at present.  Due to inventions in medicine, better food more people survived to reproduce, and here we have the current population.

My question is this, how much does the earth weigh?  Wikipedia says 6.585 x 10 to the 21st power.  Oh and I am sure we do pick up a few tons from meteor impacts on the surface, eh? Just a thought.


Gulp, given that nothing comes from nothing uh unless you live in the Quantum universe, do 7 billion people make the planet heavier?  I think there is a law of physics something like the conservation of energy and matter that covers this.

I'm thinking we need a plague before we consume everything and the planet is reduced a pile of dust and a few surviving microbes. 

A few years ago one of my roomies had a very nice picture hanging in the living room it was a landscape of the seashore, mountains, forest etc...until you walk up to and take a closer look, everything was covered with people...EVERYTHING. 

New structure

This odd looking "patio" was just built in the last couple of days, so far it has three walls and no roof.   It will hold the back up power generator for the new hospital.  It cuts off the view out of the medical records window, this view is from my desk.  I wonder if the will put in a new generator, maybe a big old Caterpillar thingy.
Should be very noisy.  I'm thinking the bushes probably need to come out if they plan to somehow put on doors to enclose it.  We shall see.

Bricks are going up all over the place

The nice stone facade is nearly up 100% around the building.  That is the upper floor entrance to the emergency room.  Fancy.

This is the view out of the boss lady's window to the right, the curved wall is the driveway to the top level ER entrance.

Well that huge pile of rocks has been flattened and rearranged so that there is plenty of stable access for large machines to drive right up and lift stuff and supplies and workers into place.  The weather has held on beautifully, lovely Indian Summer, local weather calls for freeze warning tonight. 

Product review...kind of...

This past week I have been visited by one of the minor plagues, the common cold.  I worked part of Monday, part of Tuesday, Part of Wednesday, missed Thursday, worked part of Friday.  During this time I suffered the usual symptoms; migrating sore throat, migrating nasal congestion, migrating cough, migrating lung congestion. I had a PE teacher years ago give a student a hard time about her absence excuse from school, apparently her mother had written"Please excuse little Bunulla from school as she had a chest cold and a head cold".  The PE teacher yelped, "That's not possible to have a chest cold and head cold at the same time".  I got information for you, teach...yeah you can.  

Any way I dosed myself with the usual Alka Seltzer cold relief, some expectorant cough syrup, some sore throat lozenges...nuthin.   I finally purchased a box of Mucinex. First of all the commercials are one of the the MOST DISGUSTING COMMERCIALS on air...ever.  Well except for a certain nameless drippy cat food commercial from the 70's.  ANYway...I decided to gulp one down.  The first thing I noticed upon said gulping was INSTANT DEHYDRATION.  I could breath, thank you.  I needed to drink LOTS of water.

The active ingredient for each pill is 600 mgs of Guaifenesin...that's it!  So go google Guaifenesin and purchase that, same effect and you will not have supported the industry that created the gawdawful commercial.  Oh yeah, wear the blue mask, it won't protect anyone from the virus but it looks like you are trying and everyone will feel better and actually rebreathing your own air will keep you a little hydrated.

Cooking with ready made ingredients.

First of all these are not cinnamon rolls, those are stuffed biscuits.  Stuff with mushroom, sweet Italian sausage, shallots, 4 ounces of cream cheese and either Parsley or Cilantro.  If the left over herbs have turned all black on the cut edges, it is Cilantro.  I also made stuffed Portabello mushrooms using the same filling, popped in a 350 degree oven for approximately 30 minutes, I left the biscuits in longer than the package recommended 13 to 17 minutes, as I wanted them golden, brown and delicious.  And they were.  Husband actually preferred the mushrooms they were meatier.  This from the bread eating member of the family.

So next topic;   I used a new to me product the other night,  you have seen the commercial; a young couple are in the kitchen and a man appears outside their patio door, he comes in, the husband mutters, "Chris Angel?".  He says, come and put a package of microwave popcorn in the microwave, hits the popcorn button, gives a one eyed grimace, and the machine goes "ding".  He pulls out the popcorn and asks, "Do you know what this is?", The man says, "Its a bag of Orville Redenbacher popcorn.",  Chris Angel says, "Do you know what THIS is?" and swiftly dramatically pulls the top off the bag of popcorn.  The wife exclaims in an excited voice, "It's not a bag it's a bowl! How did you do that!?"

At that point I must interject MY experience with Orville's bowl in a bag concept.  I put my bag of microwave pop corn in the microwave, set the timer for 2 minutes and 15 seconds and waited.
Took out the bag, grasped the lid of the "bowl" and gently tugged, nuthin',  tugged a little harder, tugged VERY hard.  Got out a knife, to cut gently into the membrane, pretty tough, cut sharply into the membrane, still nuthin'.  I had visions of Norman Bates going at it with a very sharp knife..Shriek! Shriek! Shriek! Got out my KITCHEN SHEARS, and finally managed to snip a very raggedy hole in the container.  I poured the bowl of rapidly cooling popcorn into a REAL bowl and declared myself the winner!  There was no instant sleight of hand removal of the lid from the bowl, there was no magic.  But the rapidly cooling popcorn was tasty. 

BOOK REPORT..real book...real report

I was encouraged to read this book, "At Home" By Bill Bryson.

Subtitled "A short history of private life".  Mr.Bryson has written about life in a Church of England Vicarage in which he lived for a period of time.  He decided that he could write a history merely from the rooms of the house...and the garden.  So far I am up to the garden.  Capability Brown gets mentioned.

This book has been described as a good conversation.  I agree and I'm not through reading the thing.

So far my favorite excerpt is from the study and I quote exactly:

At times in the past attempts have been made to capitalize on bat's special qualities.  In the Second World War, the American military invested a great deal of time and money in an extraordinary plan to arm bats with tiny incendiary bombs and to release them in vast numbers -- as many as a million at a time -- from planes over Japan.  The idea was that the bats would roost in eaves and roof spaces, and that soon afterward tiny detonators on timers would go off and they would burst into flames, causing hundreds and thousands of fires.

  Creating sufficiently tiny bombs and timers required a great deal of experiment and ingenuity, but finally in the spring of 1943 work had progressed sufficiently that a trial was set to take place on Muroc Lake, California.  It would be putting it mildly to say that matters didn't go quite to plan.  Remarkably for an experiment, the bats were fully armed with live bomblets when released.  This proved not to be a good idea.  The bats failed to light on any of the designated targets, but did destroy all the hangars and most of the storage building at the Lake Muroc airport, as well as an army generals car.

Snort, giggle, hardy har har har.....

Justice for all....



I am not normally a heavy metal fan but I googled "And Justice For All" and this is what popped up.  Strange.

Recap of jury duty this week.  My number was called Tuesday evening.  I found some sketchy parking on the jail side of the complex and trudged to the juror room.  The room holds about 90 chairs and every chair was full.  O, joy.  The sign in method was fairly slick, (It was SO slick, I didn't even get a chance to read my  kindle at all), tell them your number, name, get a form to fill out for jury fee and take a seat.  We watched a fairly decent video entitled "Justice For All" and then we were roughly divided into three groups as there were three trials that day.  I went to the court just down the hall and listened to the opening remarks on a case involving reckless endangerment.  The alleged perp was accused of endangering two young boys, 12 and 8 I think.  A firearm was shot, and I was mildly puzzled that this made it to criminal court but again second guessing myself, I figured it was because a firearm was involved.  My assignment for the remainder of my time is to listen to the call in number each week night through the 14th.  O yay.