Mmmm. Chicken McNuggets.
Think I can go for ten right now.
She’s young & very pretty, she can poison a bit longer.
Mmm, strawberry shortcake? Yum!
Enjoy it now–when you get a little older, all that stuff catches up with you, and then you have to start eating right and getting enough sleep and drinking water (no soda). No more french fries and deep-fried chicken parts and donuts and cold pizza. Being old sucks.
ScareyFaerie, oatmeal cookies with ginger syrup sound just lovely. Do you have a recipe? Would it be just too much if you made them with bits of candied ginger? I think you can never have too much ginger, but maybe that’s just me.
Samoas are good, samosas are better, but mimosas are the best! I try to avoid tsunamis whenever I can.
How tragic. All of those bananas gave their lives for nothing! Did the mixer survive? I’m such a klutz and I have long hair–I’m lucky I’ve never done something like this.
Woohoo!! I’m glad things are going better today. Tuesdays are usually better than Mondays.
Cherry, your kids are gorgeous! They take after you, right?
Haze, I hope you get the roommate situation worked out. Having a roommate is worse than getting married, because when you’re married, at least you have other benefits. That makes it a lot easier to deal with someone else’s messes.
Hi, MCUNE! It gets kind of crazy in here sometimes, but it’s always fun!
Huh. I never would have guessed that. Your raspberry, lemon, and coconut cake sounds fantastic! I must have missed that when I came in–the table is kind of full. And when are you going to share some recipes with us?
Did you bring enough for everyone? :dubious:
Thanks for the welcome! And of course I brought enough, every else just gets to make their own. Just no licking the spoon, lol.
okay - you are now firmly ensconced, McUne. Time to cough up the membership fee. 
Well, I could use the banana bread story as another MMP, but I’ll tell it here instead.
I had long blonde hair, and I didn’t do pontails etc (not like now, when I live in a ponytail). I had a handheld mixer and was just finished putting in the flour. Had the pan greased and floured, oven preheated and everything.
The mixer caught my hair as I was bending over the bowl just a tad. It quickly (more quickly than it takes to say it) wound up my locks to my scalp. It stopped there. It was all tangled in the beaters, and around the beater stems–a gloppy, soggy mess. We managed to unwind most of it, but did have to cut some of it.
Threw the batter away and took a shower.
Kai-glad to hear that someone else did this.
I did use this to my advantage–one day in 7th grade creative writing, I wrote this up (I think I may still have that paper somewhere). I misspelled banana, but got an A+. 
Off to work for the Man tomorrow. I am sick of hanging around the house, so this is a good thing. I really want to ride my new bike and I think this weekend I’ll finally feel well enough to do that.
Night all.
Wow, sure is festive in here! And so much food! I totally missed the cake. How yummy.
Boy, Snakes, someone needs to take that preacher guy aside and read him the riot act. At the very least, whoever’s sitting with Libby needs to escort him out of the room if he shows up again. Can she also let hospital staff know about his behavior or otherwise complain so that he is at least told he was miles out of line? Not that he’ll get it (sounds like a pretty obtuse type to me).
Yay on the good forecasting, taxi! Obviously, they’ve just had the wrong people working on this in the past!
Welcome, McUne! I hope LOUNE has informed you of your responsibility for “investing” in our retirement program. Yep, everyone in here who’s…hmmm, where’s the threshold this week?..under 35 is actually working hard to ensure that the rest of us have a comfortable retirement.
::Munches on a crab leg::
Hope the docs get things figured out soon, Drae. I’m keeping fingers crossed on the job interview.
I’m back from our volunteer meeting at the park. It was fun. We got to tour what’s set up of the outdoor sculpture installation that will be on exhibit starting Saturday. Half of it went up today; the other half goes up tomorrow and maybe Friday. Everything looks really cool.
I have tomorrow off so that I can play in the morning (either clean house or work in the garden, depending on the weather), go see Harry Potter in the afternoon, then go to a party in the evening. Yeah, I’m a regular social butterfly this week.
I’m sleepy now, though…
Off to beddie-bye.
GT
I’m home! I go away for a few hours, and you guys are up tp page 5?!? What a party.
rigs, let the taps run, I can always go to Confession later(I’ve always wanted to start a Confession with “Father, y’all ain’t goina belive this shit.” 
)
BioTigs, I could go for crab cakes. I usually get them from my nice neighbor, Mrs. Paul.
Welcome, **Most Creative User Name Ever **. How ya doin’? I’m single, unlike some people in this thread.
kai, the pirok rocked! I’ll have some crab legs, though.
Beautiful kids, Ellen.
Mork, I worry that you nemisis is an ice cream truck. What happened to punks and pidgins and stuff?
Neat song Meeks. Let’s not wake swampbeer and BBBobbio.
It’s hot. Even against the air conditioning, it’s hot.
I heard from a friend in another building that there was a fight, and that it involved bullets in the aforementioned mystery crime, hence the evidence markers and their placement. (Shell casings, evidently) It would also explain the wide cordoned off area and the fact that there were five cop cars attending to the situation. Scary stuff. I hope they caught the guy.
Doggio - Have you encountered something that you instantly, intensely despise? It could be a song, or a TV show, or whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s just such an insipid, vile, steaming, putrid, bubbling puddle of the vilest black ocher you have ever encountered and you would like nothing better than to see it annihilated in spectacularly satisfying fashion. Celebrity Big Brother, only with less D-list and more soft serve. That is this ice cream truck. Or more specifically, the tune it produces from its speaker horns at such a volume that the sound waves distort the very air around them. If you have not encountered one of these before – and I envy you if you have not – let me try and describe it for you, though mere words cannot hope to do justice to its evilness:
Imagine one of those annoying Christmas cards that incessantly plays a tinny, monotimbral tune when you open it. Pretend it’s not a Christmas ditty, but rather some random selection from a children’s song CD. Now pump that noise through a stadium speaker stack with the master volume dial set to 11. Also, set the EQ so that all of the sliders above 5K are at maximum. Now, add a 4/4 bass drum to keep the beat. A bass drum that sounds like a dog bark. And a snare. Make that a duck quack. Arrange these two in a standard kick-snare-kick-snare arrangement, say around 120BPM. No hats. We don’t need hats. A pig oink though should be added every 4 bars to serve as a jaunty bit of filigree. Make the entire song 8 bars long – mercifully short. When the song ends, insert a bratty-sounding female voice saying, “HellOOO?” (said in a sarcastic manner that suggests it should be followed with, “Like, WTF?”) Then repeat.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until your ears bleed geysers. This should only take about four or five rounds.
This is the concentrated, spewing evil that is The Hello Ice Cream Truck. And it must be killed for the good of mankind.
But right now, I must go to bed so that I may conserve my strength for the next battle.
Wow, Mindfield. You almost have me convinced. And I like ice cream trucks.
I ended up getting a 6 pc McNugget thing right after class - thankfully I only had 3 dollars and a quarter on me so I couldn’t afford more. Mayhaps my skin will curse me later, but my stomach thanked me at the moment. 
Although this past year’s lack of exercise + unhealthy eating is slowly starting to catch up with me, as I found to my sorrow when I went to the beach yesterday. :eek: As soon as I move up north I’m going to start belly-dancing again.
All y’all going on about crab cakes is making me curious. I suppose there might be a decent seafood restaurant somewhere in Chicago. I haven’t tried much Western seafood - for me, seafood is mostly sashimi and sushi, but next time I get a chance I’ll give these crabcakes a try.
Wow, and I thought I had a bad day. I spent my day trying to get a bank “customer service” person who is making random phone calls know, via the 4 supervisors that I spoke with, that his approach was beyond irritating and that irritating is not the goal of customer service people in regards to their existing customers.
Wow, I go to sleep for 8 hours and I have to go through more than a page of new stuff :eek:
I cheated. I skimmed…
I don’t believe you. Cite?
**Bobbio **-- the only reason you got to welcome **McUne **first is that I was asleep! I tellz ya, Time Zones is Teh Evil!!!11!! More evil than a whole fleet of Ice Cream trucks! :mad::mad::mad:
Special Teen is all excited – her favorite band in the whole world, NightWish, (they’re a Finnish Symphonic Metal band, pretty obscure, but she loves them) is appearing in Tel-Aviv in October, and she now has a ticket. Her first honest-to-gosh Rock (well, Metal, actually) Concert.
I’d go too – they really are good – but I’m afraid I’d embarrass her… :o
Good Morning, y’all!! Good Night, **Roo ** Don’t let the [del]assholes[/del]telemarketers get you down!
Gosh, you’ve been doins so much Stuff while I was off!
Before today’s description of the bullrun, one of the run itself.
The bulls arrive to Pamplona a couple of weeks before they fight. They’re kept in an enclosure that used to be at the edge of town… nowadays it’s in a low-density space (cliffs, the river; hard to put an apartment tower ther) but not at the edge any more. Every morning, the day’s bulls are driven to the arena in the morning. The Spanish word is encierro, lockup, because that’s what’s done: take the bulls from an openish area to their individual cajones, boxes, at the bullring. In other towns, this driving is now in a truck. But in Pamplona, many of the people who went “down to town” 120 years ago were farmboys; they spontaneously started joining the cowherds as they drove the bulls through the town’s streets to the arena. In 1911 (perhaps caused by that death in 1910), City Hall acknowledged the bullrun as a part of the fiesta for the first time and started the custom to have the Major check that the fence is in place and the area clean.
The corrales are at the bottom of a cliff, so at the bottom of an upslope (Sto Domingo) at which top is the image of the saint to which we sing to ask for his help. Then in goes into City Hall Square (where they shot off the rocket that indicates the start of the celebrations at noon on July 6th), Mercaderes Street, then that bend that I’ve mentioned is so dangerous and Estafeta Street. Sto Domingo is tarmac, but the others are adoquín, brick-shaped granite (or concrete) which is very slippery for both bulls and people. After Estafeta, Telefónica (the building of the phone company stands there, for many years it was about 3x taller than the next building in town not counting church towers), then the callejón and the ring. The callejón is the entrance to the ring itself; it’s not any narrower than the fenced run, but it’s enclosed and because of people fanning out incorrectly (trying to go right when they’re on the left) or people already in the ring trying to look in, it’s a spot where it’s easy to have fallen people and sometimes pileups which the bulls are likely to attack or at lest step on (being stepped on by something that weighs 500-700kg is no fun); after a pileup some 15 years ago caused several wounded, they opened slits at the bottom, so that now if you fall there you can roll out.
A San Fermín venimos
por ser nuestro patrón
nos guíe en el encierro
dándonos su bendición.
Off goes the rocket and off go the bulls. Very compact in Mercaderes, the reporters from TV like it when they’re a bit less compact because it’s more spectacular (guys can get in between the bulls) but I like it compact because when they’re all close up there’s no wounded. A few fallen guys, haven’t seen any try to stand, they’ve “done the turtle” correctly (face down, chin against chest, brow against street, protect nape with both hands).
A black bull and a soapy one have separated in Estafeta, but haven’t attacked people until Telefónica, where the soapy has also turned 'round and attacked a group of people who were all trying to jump the same part of the fence. Then he’s decided that he disliked a guy with a black blusón (blousy shirt) and attacked him repeatedly, hitting him several times (didn’t look like he pierced); at one point the guy has ended up between the bull’s all four legs, wiggling to avoid being stepped on… he’s been able to stand up on his own once the bull has decided that he was no fun.
I’ve seen several fallen people in the callejón, but no pileup.
Red Cross report: no piercing wounds. Several people with bumps and bruises, none on skull, no dislocations.
We now happily return you to your regularly scheduled MMP and head off to see what have you been doing!
Special1, I didn’t do all that research! Just used my google-fu. For some reason it’s not working today so I can’t give credit where credit is due (should have done it yesterday). That’s from a webpage which took most of the descriptions from a book on the history of the Sanfermines; the 1910 guy didn’t appear in the book.
Mork, you don’t sign up. After the major has gone by, you just walk back into the fenced-out area. If the cops (or even the other runners) see that you look “under the influence” or wear impossible shoes they’ll take you out.
These are City Hall’s advice, in English. There are posters with this all over town, in several languages. The process a local would naturally follow is to begin by watching from the ring’s seats or from the fence (many villages don’t have bullfights at all, so no ring); later (I’ve seen kids as little as 4 on their mother’s hand) maybe get into baby runs; 13-14 graduate to cows, later a couple of ring runs (after the bulls are boxed, cows are released into the bullring, one at a time) and then an actual run with bulls on the street. Outsiders normally jump right in, often with bad shoes, often going to the places where they see less people without realizing those are the most dangerous spots, often on the weekend (where there’s too many people)…
They’re interviewing Daniel (didn’t catch the lastname), a UK Eurodeputy who ran yesterday for the first time and today second (he’s staying with a local Eurodeputy, Javier Gómez). In perfectly fine Spanish, looking like the perfect picture of a mozo in white and red (he even has the beret) and always a politician, he’s thanked City Hall and Misericordia for organizing the Fiesta, the people of Pamplona for their hospitality… 
When he said he hadn’t received any special advice, the camera has moved to his shoes - not the kind of shoes you see on someone who just “fell in from the Moon.” He may not have received special advice, but it looks like Gómez has instructed him just fine.
Mama, our notion of “not serious” is “go home in 48 hours or less.”
Every bullring is supposed to have an infirmary, but those in many, many rings are little more than abbatoirs for men. When the bullfighter Paquirri bled to death from a piercing wound to the thigh affecting the artery (they’d had only two bags of blood), one of the things that some comentators dared mention is that the only rings where he might have survived were Las Ventas in Madrid and Pamplona’s. And in Las Ventas - it’s a might; they would have needed to ship him to La Paz Hospital. In Pamplona the “infirmary” has a fully-equipped surgery; they bring both O- blood and blood prematched to that day’s bullfighters. The regulations on what’s needed at bullring infirmaries have been tightened (one of the things they’re doing during the current construction work in Barcelona’s Monumental is modernize the infirmary, for example), but I remember the shameful contrast between the stark white tile of Pamplona’s infirmary and the crumbling plaster in others…
Is Mc1 LOUNE’s evil twin? Or is LOUNE the evil one? Welcome anyway! Nice of you to drop by our party on your first day here food is in the kitchen.
I hate insommnia!
Welcome Mc1! Don’t worry about the singin’. BBBobbio is always off key but that’s ok cause he makes up for it in volume.
Mornin’ Y’all! Hope everyone’s day is goin’/will go well. I am up and caffienatin’. Tryin’ to psych myself up for a day of safety/OSHA training. Hee! They gave us a training manual that has all the tests in it, so I looked over it and picked out all the answers. I wonder if anybody else did that.
Ummmm… don’t know what else to say right now, except, Snakes I hope that “pastor” gets his priviledges revoked. :mad:
Off to get safteyed (saftied?) and learn more of the joy of beer makin’! Later y’all!
Morning all!
MagicEyes - I don’t have a specific recipe for the oatmeal cookies, but this is the one I use most often. It’s got sea salt sprinkled on top of the cookies so you get a nice sharp contrast with the sweet syrup. Of course, if you don’t want to use salt, you can sprinkle with sugar instead. The syrup itself is plain golden syrup mixed with ground ginger - just put in as much ginger as you want, it depends how strong you like it.
Ingredients:
* 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
* 1 cup light brown sugar
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 2 large eggs
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1 3/4 cups flour
* 2 cups rolled oats (not quick-cooking)
* Sea salt, for sprinkling
Directions:
Beat the butter for a few minutes until light and fluffy. Add the sugars, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon, beating until the mixture is well blended. Add the eggs and vanilla extract, mixing until well incorporated. Add the flour and oats, mixing just until they are incorporated. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill the dough for at least an hour before baking.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
Form the dough into golf ball-size balls and place about 2 inches apart on the baking sheet. Sprinkle sea salt generously on top of each ball of dough, as you would sugar. Bake 1 sheet at a time for 15 minutes or until the cookies are puffed and beginning to turn golden, being careful not to overbake. (The cookies should have a tender interior.) Transfer the cookies, still on the parchment paper, to a wire rack to cool completely.
Kai - am I too late for some of your raspberry cake? I missed the mention of it before, and I’d much prefer it to crabcakes (I’m a vegetarian, so seafood’s definitely not on my menu!).
I’ve just had a meeting with my boss (Tin Knickers), she told me they’d made an appointment for our secondment post after yesterday’s interviews but declined to tell me who it was. The other really important thing, the thing that required a meeting in her office with the door closed…was to tell me that we’re having our office re-arranged next month and our desks will be moving about a metre down the office. I’m so stunned.
Is it hometime yet? It’s Wednesday and that means beerverages tonight. I think I might need to start early.
Welcome, Mc1, I’m sure you’ll fit right in with this crowd. Just watch out for the guys, they have a tendency to drool.
Just a quick early “Hi-ho!!” before I go into a tidying frenzy. Gonna run the vacuum and dust a bit and generally get the house more or less decent looking before I head off to the airport. Like the kids’ll care what the house looks like!! But I’m excited, 'cause my baby’s coming today! YAAAAAYYY!!
Off to the shower with me. If I get enough tidying done before 9, I may pop back in. If you’re lucky.
Good morning everyone, I managed to check in here at Dope first and haven’t even peeked at my other boards yet, I think I’m had, lol.
ScareyFaerie That recipe for cookies sounds delish!! I’m saving it and am going to make it. I love baking, and am always looking for new recipes. Thanks for posting it.
Thank you everyone for the warm welcome!