Archive for March, 2014

Useful things to do with an iPhone camera #178332.3089

Tuesday, March 11th, 2014

mandarinsI took this photo at the Plum Market this afternoon because I knew with absolute certainty that if I happened to get a cashier who didn’t know what kind of orange-type produce these were, I would NOT remember “Stem and Leaf Tango Mandarin”. These babies are really really good but there are about a billion other really really good varieties of mandarin oranges or whatever at the Plum Market at this time of year and I cannot sort them out, except that these are the only ones that are sold with stems and leaves still attached. My cashier today either knew what they were or guessed. In any case, he didn’t ask me. If he had, I’d’ve been prepared. With my photoooo.

I didn’t really need anything from the Plum Market this afternoon. I could have cobbled together a perfectly acceptable enhanced leftover dinner from whatever is in the Landfill Refrigimatator. Why did I walk over there? Because it was 52 degrees this afternoon and enough ice has melted that I COULD walk over there in my Keen sandals WITHOUT YakTrax and WITHOUT fear of slipping on ice. I had one rather ugly mudpuddle to navigate, which I did by waiting for traffic to clear on the North Maple Raceway and RUNNING at the edge of the road for 10 yards or so. Other than that, it was smooth sailing. Weather forecast for tonight through tomorrow night? Nine inches of snow? Yes. And then dropping down to around zero for Thursday morning. Am I happy about this? Noooooo, I am not! Am I ready for this? Yesssssss, I am.

I know you are tired of hearing anything more about the Neverending Winter here in the god-forsaken Great Lake State. It was only two years ago that we were having temperatures in the 80s for days on end. In March. All the trees blossomed [way too early] and somewhere around this date, the Dexter Tornado rolled through. Dexter is six or seven miles to the west of The Landfill. Nothing like that this year. Weather here is a mixed bag.

In which I can actually walk out my front door without falling on my butt

Monday, March 10th, 2014

snowmeltOr my head, which would be a lot worse. For about the last week, getting out the front door involved careful mincing little steps (even with YakTrax), a hiking pole and / or hanging on to the recycle cart for Dear Life (just off to the right, out of sight). Our driveway is a mess from the get-go but there is a tricky little micro-climate just off the front step where the sun don’t shine — ever — that defies all attempts at de-icing. I’m sure the postman hates us and I totally understand his pain. I salted the hell out of it yesterday, maybe you can see a few salt crystals if you embiggen the photooo. That made it marginally less slippery but didn’t get rid of the ice. An afternoon of 50 degree temps did the trick. For the moment. Six inches of snow Tuesday night through Wednesday night? Yeaachh.

So, the one or two of my five readers who don’t use facebook may have been wondering about my whereabouts yesterday. It was a server move, always exciting. Or not. Can I just say that I have the best Web Guy on the face of the planet? No, it is not the GG although he has some good credibility as a tech guru. My Own Personal Blahg Guru hosts me and a bunch of other Ragtag Renegades (something like that). He proactively moves us if a host implodes, updates WordPress for us when necessary, and any number of other tasks that I don’t think I even want to know about. And he answers stupid questions from people who should know better…

When you move to a new server, it takes Them Thar Tubes a little while to catch up. Mind you, it takes a lot less time nowadays than it did back when I dragged YAG onto the web but there can be a few little bumps in the road. Email settings are typically my nemesis and so they were this go ’round. I’ll spare you the gory details but, after contacting The Guru a couple of times yesterday, I had email working perfectly on both my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. Until about noon today, when my phone stopped retrieving email and started spitting out error messages. In a panic (oh, not really a panic), I texted The Guru. Actually, I think I texted his SO who doubles as my BFF. He said something like, “Maybe you have hit a cell tower that hasn’t propagated the DNS data yet.” Duh. Why didn’t I think of that? There is no wifi in my cube farm (online banking, don’tcha know) and we all rely on the cell network to manage our personal email and check facebook and look up p0rn cat pictures and stuff. I often find myself switching between the LTE and 4G networks in that location, I just usually get that spinning thing, not error messages. Today, I switched cell networks and all my damn spam came flowing in. Happy days are here again.

Just want to make it clear that it is not The Guru’s fault that I get so much email spam. I believe it is an artifact of having the same email address since back in the Wild Wild West days of Them Thar Tubes.

Cheers to The Guru and Sam of Archaeofacts!

Landfill Dungeon UNFO

Monday, March 10th, 2014

ironclockBack online after yesterday’s successful server move! Thanks JCB! And this is what I wrote:

This artifact has been hanging out on top of one of the yaffa blocks in the Landfill Dungeon for months. It’s cute, isn’t it? Occasionally I have gotten to wondering what it is, exactly. It looks like an iron, right? It has a most interesting lucky-shuckial plug. I found myself wondering something like, is this something that plugs into the outlets in Senegal?

Today, Lizard Breath came over to have lunch, dump off some recycling, and do laundry. We were talking about the stuffed aminals in the dungeon and Liz went down there to throw laundry in and take a look around and found the “iron”. She recognized that it does not have a lucky-shuckial plug at all. Well, not exactly. It plugs into an iPhone! Of course this artifact had to get Instagrammed and that activity got an instant reply: “It’s an alarm clock!” (And also, “Why are you looking through my stuff?”) Apparently this cute little artifact doesn’t work very well in terms of its intended purpose but maybe I’ll find a little spot for it in the new Landfill Chitchen. If its owner doesn’t want it.

I dunno, we HAVE to get rid of most of the stuffed aminals but they are so real to some of us that I don’t think any of us have the strength to just throw them in a bag and donate them. My latest brainstorm is to host a driveway adoption event. Kind of like a garage sale thing except it’ll be limited to stuffties and we will NOT be selling them. We’ll see though. In any case, we cannot host any kind of driveway event until the goddamn piles of snow and sheets of ice go away!

It was 16 degrees this morning and although I did a truncated version of my Skunk Walk, the ice was intermittently treacherous and after I got home, I kind of felt like a shut-in for a while there. I am too young to be a damn shut-in. I felt a little better after Liz and I navigated the ice walking to the Plum Market and she actually borrowed my REI hiking pole a couple times. If a 20-something is struggling with this shit, it’s not just me.

And yes, I am happy to take recycling from Liz’s apartment in Detroit. People do recycle in Detroit but the recycling system there is nowhere near as evolved as what we have here on The Planet Ann Arbor, which I won’t describe but it involves a weekly truck with a big mechanical arm. I am the Queen of Recycling. I schlep stuff down from the yooperland and the Group Home and I am probably as annoying as all getout to others who share those spaces with me. I’m sure it’s a culture shock to move from someplace like San Francisco, where recycling is even more evolved than it is here on the planet, to Detroit, where streetlights are a luxury in some neighborhoods.

And laundry? Bring it! Make no mistake, the beach urchins have been doing their own laundry since about middle school. If ya wanna getcher laundry done right, don’t let mooom do it. Moom is all about doing it fast… She might look out for stuff that *she* wants to be specially processed but not necessarily *your* stuff. I LOVE when my kids bring laundry home. I have even been known to finish a load of aprons from Mouse’s work. Mouse’s boss was apparently amazed that I FOLDED them. I am me and I fold laundry.

Bleeeeeeeeg

Saturday, March 8th, 2014

bopOh, not really bleeeeeeeg but can we just say that I did not get drunk on sunshine today? The skies were not cloudy all day and the temperature hovered on or just above the freezing mark. Snow was melting but there were areas of barely perceptible slush, which meant that depending on where you were trying to walk, you were never quite sure whether it was slippery or not.

I somehow managed to hike down to Kerrytown to meet up with Mouse. Actually it was pretty okay after I navigated my street and this end of the schoolyard — total ice. I was even able to take my YakTrax off although there were some challenging spots, which made me glad I had my REI hiking pole. At one point, I was walking down Miller — in the street — and a cute little hybrid Civic passed me and somebody yelled, “Hey KW!” It was W1.5! I gleefully saluted him with my pole! His wife is a regular on my Skunk Walk but after wrenching her knee by slipping on ice (*in* YakTrax, it’s that bad this year) she has temporarily changed her walking venue to the track over at Sky High. I continue to try to pick my way through the ice.

Mouse and I perused the offerings at Treasure Mart, then hit the farmer’s market (I bought potatoes, onions, and greens), then we had an early-ish bop (bibimbap) lunch at Kosmo, where we didn’t exactly get what we (aka Mouse) ordered but it was good anyway. Note to self: make bop at home. You can do it! You know you can.

I saw lots of interesting stuff at Treasure Mart and if only I weren’t trying to de-hoard… At one point, I probably embarrassed my mouse by telling a store employee that a certain artifact would probably fit into my hillbilly trailer. Politically incorrect? Yeah probably. The response from the store employee was something like, “You have a hillbilly trailer?” As weirdly as I was dressed today, I probably looked more like one o’ them thar Ann Arbor hippies liberals than a hillbilly. But yes, we do have a hillbilly-looking trailer and it has been useful so many times over the years and I sometimes think I am more hillbilly than what The Commander brought me up to be but that would be a whole ‘nother blahg entry and I don’t have the words for it tonight. In the end, we didn’t buy anything at Treasure Mart, not even the wooden shore bird.

Can you believe that I saw W1.5 in his cute little hybrid Civic a second time today? I was on my way back from the Plum Market this afternoon and there he was making a left turn onto N. Maple. He did not hail me that time. We were both dealing with complicated traffic situations.

Hey, let’s empty out the bedroom closet and paint it!

Friday, March 7th, 2014

canistersLet me tell you, if you ever need a weekend of spacification from your long-suffering significant other, today’s title will probably get you exactly that!

When you are doing a renovation, you are tuned in to design blahgs and websites — Houzz and Dwell are two that come to mind. I clicked over to something somewhere about reorganizing closets and, even though our current prodject here is not about reorganizing closets, somebody had painted their closet PINK and installed a whole bunch of white shelves and drawers and rods (a “system” but I’ll get to that). Now, I would NEVER paint our closet PINK (of all things) but I just thought, “WOW! We could paint our closet!” Who’da thunk it? (Exit the GG to go hang out with *sane* people “up north”.)

About closet “systems” (and systems in general). I cannot count how many times I have gone out and bought plastic “storage” items to try to organize things. Anyone want a Yaffa block? Actually, I’m *using* the Yaffa blocks I haven’t gotten rid of. And when I do put them out by the curb, they get snapped up almost immediately. Those ultra-organized closets with all the fancy organizing “stuff” in them look great on the internet but I know a few things about self-imposed “systems”. First, they work! Until they don’t work. And when they stop working, you have to face up to the fact that they aren’t working but then how the heck do you get rid of them. You’ve spent *money* on them, roight? Life is messy and even things that seem really straightforward can get complicated fast. The best strategy? Get rid of everything you aren’t using. Less is better. Unless you are thinking about twins, like the GG and the UU, who are probably whooping it up at Bennethums or someplace. Wish I was there but somebody has to earn a living around here. [wink]

I got myself focused on canisters today. These are the items that still reside on the shelf above the wood table in the Landfill Chitchen. Mixed bag, right? There was more stuff on this shelf but I stored all of the empty containers. The checkerboard canisters were a wedding gift. I LOVE them but they are metal and two of them rusted. I haven’t found new canisters that I like. And then I thought, “Why do I need canisters at all?” Hmmmm…

Anyway, that’s a pretty dern mixed bag of styles there on that shelf. I don’t think I will keep the canisters. The little pitcher was my mom’s and I remember her using it for milk in my childhood. She actually gave it to me a couple years before she died. Not sure what she would think about all those scissors but I do think it’ll work in my new chitchen. The northern woods type crock? I love it. It won’t work in my new chitchen. It’ll have to find a new home, hopefully in my house.

Tomorrow? I am heading down to Treasure Mart (THANK YOU JANE!). I’ll be walking. I am hoping against hope that I do not have to walk all the way down there with YakTrax and my REI hiking pole. We’ll see. After some research, I actually think I am going to continue with Mexican glassware but mix it up a bit but it’ll still be fun to hit up Treasure Mart. Who knows? Maybe they’ll have an aardvark or a hippo or something.

Shop until you drop

Thursday, March 6th, 2014

pier1Am I turning into a shopper [again] or am I just drunk on sunshine? I was a shopping fiend for most of the first, oh, I dunno, maybe 50 years of my life? I was trained well by none other than The Commander, whose childhood career was in retail. She knew how to shop. She knew every store in Sault Ste. Siberia. When we couldn’t get good quality “stuff” on the American side, we headed over to the [larger and arguably more cultured] Canadian side. We traveled to Detroit a couple times a year to buy clothes and stuff at the downtown Hudson’s and we made loverly summer day trips to Petoskey with Radical Betty. Oh, how I miss those trips. And make no mistake, Petoskey is not some backwater “Up North” hick town. Plenty of wealthy folks have vacation homes in that gorgeous area and they do shop. Sak’s Fifth Avenue anyone?

I have spent the last decade in a serious flinging mode, be it somewhat off and on. Shopping became a chore and than kind of repugnant. I don’t need any more STUFF. I want to simplify my life.

Nevertheless, today I was restless and I took off during the lunch “hour”. I went to Whole Foods for a couple of groceries and then, as I was driving out of the parking lot, I spotted a Pier 1 Imports! I think I remember hearing that a new one was opening but I hadn’t seen it because I do not shop.

I shopped today. I did not buy. If you are one of my five regular readers, you know that I am rethinking my china and glassware. This wall of glassware was in Pier 1. If you look over there on the right, you will see the glasses that I blahgged about a few days ago.

I was reconsidering getting rid of those. Did you see the UU’s comment on that post? The UU did buy me a couple of those glasses. We were at Kitchen Port and I asked him who he was buying those for. His reply was, “My sister-in-law.” I racked my brain trying to think which sister-in-law he was talking about. *I* was not his sister-in-law at the time, just his identical twin’s (sometimes high-maintenance) girlfriend. I didn’t know it that day but I did become his sister-in-law and I have enjoyed that relationship with the UU and his beautiful wife for many years now. He bought those glasses for meeee.

I think I will keep those glasses for now, at least the ones that aren’t discoloring. Maybe I will assess my collection and add to it — carefully. Maybe someday, I will have a grandchild who will want my cool old Mexican glass collection. And that was NOT a hint!!!! Just a note that sometimes taste in decor seems to skip generations and I’m very happy that I was able to unload quite a bit of The Commander’s stuff on her grandchildren and so I didn’t have to donate ALL of her stuff to various organizations. Although I am happy to think that some of her stuff may now be useful to people who can’t just go out and buy a couch or whatever whenever they want to. I remember when buying a goddamn couch was a major financial decision.

Things I won’t miss about my Fugly Kitchen #4

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

I was scouting about for another topic to post about in this series and then I remembered [rumble-de-thump] the lazy susans! The ones in these corner cabinets.

lazysusan1

The lazy susans that do not have RIMS on them! Why why why why! (Also, why have I been living with them for more years than I am strong enough to count?) Here is the upper lazy susan. Note the mango jam from Suze in Fla! She is a *master* at gardening!

lazysusan3

The upper cabinet is one of several rodent turd depositories here at The Landfill. The lower cabinet doesn’t get shat in but it is where rumble-de-thump happens.

lazysusan2

Rumble-de-thump? That happens when the shelves are overloaded and when you spin the lazy susan looking for water chestnuts, things fall off the shelves, usually back in the nether reaches of the cabinet. As you might be able to tell, it’s not all that easy to reach your arm back into those nether reaches because the REFRIGERATOR is right there.

I am not against lazy susans. I just think they need to have rims. Roight? In the New Chitchen, the refrigerator will move and I will not have any damn corner cabinets.

If I order some new YakTrax, dooya think it’ll stop snowing someday?

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014

elsnowI actually did order a couple pairs of YakTrax today. I am currently on my third pair for the winter or polar vortex or whatever. That’s not three NEW pairs, mind you. I began the PV with whatever I was using at the end of last winter. With luck, my current pair will last until the bitter end and I’ll be able to stash the new ones away until next year. Always be prepared. Someone (I won’t say who) once kvetched a bit about how YakTrax shouldn’t be considered consumables. I say better to consume YakTrax than bones and/or brain tissue. I want to think that my rash act of ordering new YakTrax at the end (?) of the season will prompt warm, loverly weather but given the 10-day forecast, I don’t hold out much hope.

By the way, did you know that we are up to winter storm #Titan now? #Titan didn’t hit us very hard here on the Ice Road Asteroid. As irritated as I was about our snow drive back from East Lansing the other night, it was really business as usual for these parts. I am losing track of which of those storms hit us here on Ice Road Asteroid. #Cleon and #Dion and #Ion and I fergit what else. Also, the last named winter storm? #Zephyr? Really? Gentle breeze? Will we make it to Z? I think somebody has a pretty good sense of humor. Then again, my Mouse was born on April 24 and I have more than one photooo of her standing in a snow squall on her birthday.

Today’s photooo? Saturday morning from our sixth floor room at the Marriott on M.A.C. Ave. in East Lansing. I am still feeling time-warpy about my walks through East Lansing over the weekend. A very hard time in my life despite great success as a flute player there. I didn’t end up pursuing a music career and don’t even play any more (long complicated thoughts about that) but I know that the creativity and persistence and attention to detail (and the ability to walk just a wee bit over on the wild side) that brought me success at playing the flute (and “puano”) and analyzing complex classical music compositions are directly responsible for my success at both of my info-tech systems analyst careers. (Education “reformers”, take a note!)

Nevertheless, I am a Successful Failure, as my parents always called themselves — and then laughed uproariously — because that’s what people in the Fin Fam do. Successful Failure? Google it if you want. There are various explanations out there. Mine is too long, so I’ll leave it for another day. Whatever my parents said, they were NOT failures in any sense of the word. I’d like to think that I’m not either but sometimes it can be an uphill climb.

I can haz new stuff?

Monday, March 3rd, 2014

glasswareWhy not? I don’t think it’s written in stone that the china and glassware you bought in your youth needs to stick around forever. The Commander switched it up at some point. Her old Russell Wright collection was dwindling and she bought some new stuff and Lizard Breath has it now. I bought Dansk open stock china when I was young. Blue and white mix and match. It’s beautiful. It will match my new chitchen (even though it’ll be in a cupboard). But somehow I think I might switch it up. If I can find something I like better.

We’ll talk about china some other time. Right now, I’m thinking about glassware. Here are a couple specimens of my glassware (with a sneaky little Le Creuset crock behind them, same color as my backsplash will be). I bought this glassware open stock at Kitchen Port back in the day. Oh, how I miss Kitchen Port. I miss Workbench too. Can I just time-travel back a few years? Just long enough to snag a new couch (or two or three)? But I digress. I loved this rustic-style glassware (I think it’s Mexican) way back then and I still do but some of it is starting to discolor and I’m wondering if it’s time for a change.

But change to what? I’m thinking cobalt blue. You know I like color, roight? My first thought is something contemporary but not too, well, what? Smooth? I like the irregularities in the glassware I own now. I like these Bormioli Rocco glasses a lot (yes, I know they aren’t cobalt blue). I like the irregular looking shape and the neon colors. I’m not sure they would be exactly right though and not sure the GG would want to live with them and I do care about that. These Artland Glassware glasses might be a bit closer to fitting the bill. I like the irregularity of the bubbles in the glass. I don’t exactly like “precision” glassware very well, where every glass is identical. Or I could go the eBay route and look for vintage cobalt glass. That could work. Even though some of it might be “precision” glassware, you know, where every glass is identical…

We’ll see what I do. I am a MASTER at creating rules for myself and then FLAGRANTLY breaking them!

Things I won’t miss about my Fugly Kitchen #3

Sunday, March 2nd, 2014

undersink1

See the little metallic thingies there in the sorta mid-upper-left? There is a magnet on the cabinet door that matches up with those. The theory is that, when you close the cabinet door, the magnet sticks to the metallic thingies and the cabinet door stays closed. Right? Roight. In your dreams. Okay, this cute little system does work correctly a lot of the time. In fact probably most of the time. And then all of a sudden it doesn’t. It’s random, kind of like the Chinese water torture. It’s easily fixable, you just have to push in one end or the other of the little metallic thingies. But it is HIGHLY ANNOYING!!! After I do not know how long it’s been that I HAVEN’T HAD this annoying little problem, as soon as we signaled the Big Go-ahead on the new Chitchen, this little system started acting up again.

But then there’s the whole under-sink cabinet in general. I wish I had thought to take a picture of what was inside this cabinet BEFORE I made the GG remove the mousetraps so I could clean it out. I do not know how I missed that. I DO NOT LIKE MOUSETRAPS. I could not tell which ones had already snapped. I knew some of them had because I have accidentally snapped them by rummaging around through all of the STUFF under there and dropping things on them. So they were all in a big tangle. I remember Grandma Sally setting mousetraps and dealing with the results with aplomb down in Fla. (Mouse, five years old, “When Grandma snaps the trap, she puts the mouse outside.” Yes…) I am not good at killing aminals, even the smallest ones. Okay, I slap moe-skee-toes and biting flies with no regrets and I try to dismember ticks!!! Yick!

undersink2

Anyway, I do not know why I actually CLEANED the surface at the bottom of the cabinet but I did. Hey, I have to live with it the next few weeks. Misewell. Doesn’t look very clean does it?

undersink3

No evidence of new rodents anywhere (they come and go) but, after this, I found damn rodent turds in the silverware drawer that now “permanently” resides on the table in the chitchen because the GG was unsuccessful in his efforts to put it back into its slot. I don’t think they are new and I don’t know why I didn’t notice them before. Maybe I was blocking them. I think I will have to clean that drawer out and wash everything in it. Again. Why the heck did Amun (or whoever) invent mice again? Oh yeah, because they run the damn universe. Of all people, I should know that.

Oh my!!! The GG has discovered Le Creuset!!! We’ll talk about that some other time!

A river runs through it

Saturday, March 1st, 2014

frogdogWe served as “booth babes” today. I am temporarily co-opting that term from the Marquis, who has performed a similar function recently, albeit in a sports coat. We didn’t have to dress up much to run our booth today. It was a North Country Trail booth. The GG dressed up in Elmer Fudd Stormy Kromer gear. Yer fav-o-rite blahgger dressed up in regular old KW winter hiking gear because yer fave actually hiked this morning.

The GG drove from our loverly hotel down south to the pavilion where our event was set up early this morning. I took off on foot, wandered a bit of East Lansing, then crossed over to the MooU campus to get a photo or two of the dorm The Commander and Radical Betty lived in way back when and just generally walk around.

When I went to school at MooU, I remember buildings. I walked from my apartment to the music building and back one or two or three or sometimes even four times a day. I had a few classes in other places that I can’t remember now (and don’t care to) and sometimes I actually went to the “libes”, as a social butterfly roommate called the library. I knew that a river ran through campus. I remember visiting that river on various occasions in various places. Today, I actually walked the sidewalk that RUNS ALONG THE RIVER and contemplated why I didn’t remember actually doing that before. Ever… The short answer is that I am very much a different person now than I was when I was a college student. The long answer? I do not know. That maybe sounds backward but it is not nearly as backward as you might think it is…

Eventually I turned south onto Farm Road and hiked a couple miles down to the Agricultural Pavilion. I spent the rest of the day interacting with the GG and The Beautiful Chelsea (who visited us) and our fellow NCT buddy G (who helped man the booth) and some of the couple hundred folks who visited our booth. I don’t actively try to engage people in conversation but I do get animated when people ask questions that I can answer (or look up on my iPhone, which I did multiple times today).

There were many many time / space warpy moments today. We represent a chapter of the NCT that maintains trail in the eastern yooperland. I suspect a lot of people were thinking we drove down from the yooperland to be at the symposium. While it wouldn’t be unheard of for folks to do that, I was always quick to note that we live on The Planet Ann Arbor Ice Road Asteroid. And G lives in Lansing. It’s complicated for me. Grew up in the UP and have family property there. Yet, I have lived on The Planet Ann Arbor Ice Road Asteroid for umpteen bazillion years, raised kids here and am on my third (or thereabouts) career here. Still, you can take the girl outta the yooperland but you can’t quiiiiite take the yooperland outta the girl. In the end, maybe that made it all more interesting (or at least surprising) for folks visiting the booth. Or maybe they didn’t give a hoot. I don’t care either way.

I had a heckuva lot of fun today but I am an introvert and so I was taaaarrrred by the late afternoon. And then we had a damn snow drive all the damn way home. Jupiter (or whoever), can I you tell I am done with this crap? But we made it safely and after we schlepped all of our stuff into The Landfill, we hoofed it over to the neighborhood pub for dinner AND DRINKS! Sheesh! Knight’s Steakhouse or @strongdrinks if you want to follow them on Twitter.

The GG wanted me to write something short tonight. Sorry buddy. It’s my blahg and if you don’t like it, just don’t read it. [insert big cheesy frog-dog grin here].