I spent the afternoon untangling spaghetti. I don’t even mean “spaghetti code”. I’ve untangled that before. I’m talking about spaghetti user interface design / functionality. FZ set me straight that something was amiss in my explanation of said functionality and then pointed me to an entity in our test environment where I could “play around”. If I check this or that or these or those checkboxes, what do I get on the report. I can sure understand why nobody has ever written this stuff up coherently. I am a quarter of the way there. I have gathered my “data” and now I need to figure out how to organize it, outline a write-up, and WRITE it up, complete with tables and screenshots and whatever we need so that no one forgets how this stuff works again!

And then it snowed (lightly) all day and the roads were messy (but fine for an Outback with a careful non-texting driver) but it was a long slog. And then when I got home, the GG met me in the driveway with his yooper scooper at hand, directing me to back out into the street so he could shovel the little bit of snow out of the driveway. It was okay, I just chilled out.

I have written about shi-shos before, I’m sure. They are a form of pasta. They come in cans with “sauce” mixed in. Can you guess what the real name for them is? I’ll give you a hint. They are round.

Little kids who don’t, you know, eat anything but air, will actually eat shi-shos. Sometimes they will eat nothing but shi-shos for weeks on end and just about the time you have bought the entire Westgate Kroger out of shi-shos (not possible in reality), and your house is overflowing with cans of shi-shos, said child decides they do not like them any more… … …

That didn’t really happen with shi-shos, at least not until after the teenage years’ ramen noodle craze (Grandroobly’s reaction to those when The Commander once served them to him was something like “kzcx”.) And then, they become adults and forge their own healthy way into eating.

Shi-shos were emergency food for a loooong time around here and nowadays when I talk to friends who have upper-el school kids, I tell them about the first time my kids cooked – on the stove – by themselves. I was in the house but I was immersed in sorting out the messiest PTO treasury on earth (another spaghetti-like prodject, which I dragged into Excel ’cause that’s what I dooooo with that kind of data) and so I was surprised when I entered the Landfill Chitchen to see a stool pulled up next to the stove and both children watching carefully over a pan of shi-shos. Mom isn’t feeding us but we’ve seen her do this a gazillion times and we can do it too.

It was fine. The shi-shos got cooked. Carefully at low heat with two young children watching carefully. The house didn’t burn down. Wish I had a picture of that but it was years before the iPhone and I didn’t even have a cell phone yet…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.