[QUOTE=Heffalump and Roo]
[taxi, it’s nice to see someone liking their job and taking pride in it. It’s inspiring.
[/QUOTE]
And I’m enjoying it even more right now. Major victory on the forecast front. I was about to scream and throw things, but problem was solved and my new method works. And I think I might just get this finished without having to spend all weekend working. And my boss said “Nice job!” Woohoo!
Hey, TransportationPerson, what’s wrong with Cranky Old Roy showing the little [del]shits[/del] darlings he means business? He wins my “Bus Driver of the Week” award!
Brandy and Scruffy are tag-teaming you already, FCM? Ooh, this is gonna get fun!
I ended up not taking a nap. I have, however, been knitting and occasionally reading, and then I went in and took a long hot shower, so now I feel closer to barely human. Papa Tigs just called to see if we wanted to drive up and join him for dinner at the yummy little restaurant at the Amish Market, and you know I’m wiped out because I said no!
You have my phone number to call if for some reason you have to cancel tomorrow, FCM. I will also understand if you’re late due to having to stop and cleaning up Scruffy pee or poo or Brandy hornk. 
Back to my knitting. Or maybe reading.
Ick for rigs and FCM, for different reasons. I hope you don’t get sick, rigs. Here’s a bucket, just in case.
Inventory was Inventoryish, which means dead boring plus nerve-wracking at the same time. You’re bored out of your skull, but still have to pay constant attention. We got free pizza. That was the good part.
Chocolate cinnamon buns are pretty easy. Just find a basic cinnamon buns recipe (or use defrosted bread dough- I’m told you can buy frozen dough in the U.S.), and make a ganache with 1 part heavy cream to 1 part chocolate chips. Nuke it until the chocolate is nice and melty. Then make the cinnamon sugar gunk. Mine is usually about a cup of melted butter to two cups brown sugar, two tablespoon or so cinnamon, and maybe half a cup hot water.
Roll the dough out, and spread heavily with the ganache. Glop sugar-stuff all over it. Roll up and slice, then let rise for and hour and bake for half an hour at 350F. If there’s leftover sugar and chocolate, I glop some of it over the risen rolls, and pour the rest on when they’re out of the oven.
These are of course a diet food.
So, the main purpose of a cat is so one can have puke to clean up? No thanks! :eek:
MBG this nerve tonic’s for you!
It’s raining here. I’m all cleaned up and dressed to do this fund raiser tonight. I don’t wanna. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really don’t wanna.
I had leftover Sonny’s BBQ for supper. It was leftover from supper last night cause I went after work and got some to bring home.
I really, really, really, really, really, really, really don’t wanna go tonight!
Feel better rigs!
pop
long day - consumed much coffee - suffered the consequences - off to rehearsal
my special birthday coding is on my home puter and I am elsewhere so here’s a realtively plain
Happy Birthday Meli
I feel crappy today. I must have caught some version of Teh Sick. No puking so far, so that’s good.
One of the neighbors decompensated this morning at 1 am. I now know far more than I wanted to. Long story short: she kicked her no-good, drug using boyfriend out, called the cops, talked to them for a while and then ran in the house and locked the door. 
I have to say that I was impressed with the officers behavior throughout. Naturally, once the cops left, the boyfriend came back. She’s been outside today occasionally, muttering and yelling. She wants her brother back (he’s in a long-term care psychiatric facility, and the mother is in the state hospital.) It’s all very tragic, but the midnight screaming and visits from the cops do get old after a while. At least I’m not her *next *door neighbor.
Then my nana called, and invited me to lunch on Monday. It will be a chance to see some of my great-aunts and assorted cousins of the second cousin, twice removed, type, whom I haven’t seen since my father’s funeral.
Happy Birthday, Ali!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALISTAIR!!
Driving Husband is coming over in a bit, and we’re thinking about dinner. I don’t want to cook. I’m all tired. That means crappy Chinese, more pizza (no), or pub food. Or Japanese. Neither of us really eat Japanese food. I think that’s all. Unfortunately the restaurants in my immediate area aren’t great. There’s lots of them, but they aren’t very interesting.
I could take the transit up to his place and go for Indian.
I want a Vietnamese restaurant right beside my house. Or a Trader Joe’s. Either would be fine.
Well first things first: Happy Birthday Ali!
So the Deep Freeze has relented for awhile, putting our temperatures in the mid to high 30’s and the sky is giving us rain instead of snow. This should be a good thing, right? Well it seems that (heh, this fits so nicely in the context of this sentence) it never rains but it pours. And pouring it has been, we got just under four inches of rain on Monday alone. Combine that with the fact that the ground is frozen five feet down, in addition to the many feet of snow and ice on top of the ground, the rain has had no place to go. Raging streams have formed on the pavement over the ice, making traffic doubly hazardous, basements have been flooded, road crews have been using snow blowers to blow the water out of the way as they hacked trenches in the berms to allow the water to go into the ponds, lakes and storm drains, and a grader broke through the road out in Monashka and needed to be pulled out by two loaders.
It’s not ordinary rain, either. Each drop is the size of a silver dollar and very cold. I had a doctor appointment Monday too, and although I was tempted to re-schedule I decided to just get it over with. As we drove by the high school I was stunned to see that the snow berm in the parking lot (where they put all the snow they grade off the parking lot) was so big that from the road I could not see the high school. :eek: Now when I go to see this particular doctor I use an entrance which is normally not used, as it is so much easier for me to navigate in The Chair. I always call ahead to make sure they have the door unlocked, and they always tell me that yes, it’s all ready for me. So this time I didn’t call, as I was beginning to feel like a nag. I slogged out to the car, carefully stepping on the patches of sand on the ice/under the water and getting my feet soaked. We get to the office and guess what? The door is locked. :mad: Skiffman leaves me in the pouring rain while he goes to the main door. By the time they get the door unlocked I was quite damp and in much less of a jovial mood than when I left my house. The doc and I do our thing, and then it’s time to leave. Travelling the sidewalk was unpleasant, between the snow/ice/rain skiffman shoved The Chair into the curb and numerous yawning cracks, jarring my entire musclo-skelatal self. By the time we got home my feet and the hem of my dress were dripping wet halfway to my knees and my hair was wetter than it is when I get out of the shower. Raynaud’s was happening, my hands and feet looked like they belonged on a corpse. And I was sore, very sore. It was a make-your-own-quesadilla night for supper, and #3 made mine for me. I swallowed a muscle relaxer with my bedtime meds and went into a heavy sleep.
Which partially accounts for the crisis which occurred around 4:30 am Tuesday. I woke up (sort of) for my regular call of nature. I was definitely not awake as I was in the loo taking care of business. As I was, um, finishing up it occurred to me that the water level in the bowl was higher than usual. I stood up to check it out just as the water breached the lip of the bowl. I was dimly aware that the water should overflow and quit, except it didn’t. The toilet kept running over, and I kept backing out toward the hall. I grabbed the throw rug as I backed out of the room entirely, and still the water kept rising. I was groggy and not quite awake, and finally I hollered for skiffman. He came hurrying down the hall and by then the water was at least three inches deep. He went in and got the water to stop (apparently in my dozing state I had hit the flush handle just enough to get it stuck in the open position, and the toilet had slowly filled up while I was, um, busy, and then kept on flowing. He grabbed a towel from the laundry and attempted to mop it up, then told me to “Go get a scooper!” As I dragged my way back down the hall the only scooper I could think of was the cut down bleach bottles everyone uses as a bailer in skiffs, and I knew that we didn’t have one. He jetted past me and grabbed the dust pan, which I thought was very clever of him to think of under the circumstances. While he was bailing out the bathroom #3 got up and came out wanting to know just what was going on! I filled her in, and when skiffman was done she headed in for her morning shower. By this time it was far too late to go back to bed, so we got on with our morning stuff. When 6:00 am came around we got The Son up, who had heard nothing (he sleeps like a rock) so we had to recount the entire episode for his amusement. :rolleyes:
The rest of Tuesday was fairly uneventful, we had a friend stop by, he’s been out fishing and it was nice to catch up with him. Then I decided to make sweet and sour pork for dinner. I decided to use a fresh pineapple as they were on sale. I did all of the cutting/chopping myself, and the stir frying of meat and veggies and fruit. It turned out well, but I had gone and stirred up the hornet’s nests which live in my hands under the disguise of carpal tunnel syndrome, and aggravated my arthritic shoulders. More pain on top of the lingering soreness from Mondays outing. grrrr. I took another muscle relaxer with my bedtime meds, and fell into a coma. Which explains why I have no recollection of telling skiffman to get up and feed the dogs Wednesday morning. The dogs get breakfast at 7:00, but they had apparently decided that they were hungry early because after he put all the bowels down he looked at the clock and it was 5:00!
So I am still sore, though not to the same degree as Monday and Tuesday. I thought I was getting The Sick but I think it’s just allergies from both the flowers my daughter sent me and the dust/mold from the boxes all the VHS tapes have been stored in. (We are still unpacking from the move before the last move.) I did get a box of treats from my Mom and Dad, so all is not gloom and doom, just another interesting week in the life of kaiwik!
More to tell later, but I think this post has rambled long enough for the time being. I need to find something to eat, all this talk of chocolate cinnamon rolls has made me hungry!
kawaik, sorry to hear about all the “excitement” around your parts. It’s so amazing to hear you describe the weather in Alaska. I can’t even imagine it. I only visited Alaska once when I was a kid and it was in the dead of summer when the day was 20 hours long. It sounds unimaginable to me in the dead of winter.
Thanks to all the MMPer’s, I’m in much better humor today than I was when this MMP started. My life is still in a bad place, but at least I’m not feeling horrible as well today. So thanks again for that.
So. . . something to share. I was driving past the Jelly Belly store the other day when I saw the Jelly Belly guy waving at me, so of course, I waved back. And that got me to thinking about the last time I went into the Jelly Belly store and saw the Harry Potter jelly bellies. They’re called Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans Have you all seen these? They’re the grossest. They have flavors like vomit, rotten egg, booger, earwax and dirt. Their flavor guide is here. When I asked the guys that worked there, they said that vomit tastes like pizza that has been baking in the sun for a few days and rotten egg smells like sulphur when you crack it open. I asked them if they sell a lot of these and they said they do. Lots of kids apparently like to feed them to their parents and watch their faces. But other than that, who would buy these?
[QUOTE=Heffalump and Roo]
]Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans
Have you all seen these? They’re the grossest. They have flavors like vomit, rotten egg, booger, earwax and dirt. Their flavor guide is here. When I asked the guys that worked there, they said that vomit tastes like pizza that has been baking in the sun for a few days and rotten egg smells like sulphur when you crack it open. I asked them if they sell a lot of these and they said they do. Lots of kids apparently like to feed them to their parents and watch their faces. But other than that, who would buy these?
[/QUOTE]
Wildly popular with Harry Potter fans. They’re almost impossible to find whenever an HP movie comes out.
My understanding is the vomit flavor really is a badly failed attempt at pizza. Gotta give Jelly Belly credit for re-tooling a flop into a success.
Forgot to say that the black pepper and grass beans are actually not bad, from what I hear. The one that really scares me is booger.
I have nightmarish visions of Jelly Belly staff nibbling jelly beans, then digging and nibbling to compare. How ELSE can they say it tastes like booger unless they’ve been tasting boogers?
I like Bernie Botts Beans! I don’t each much candy, but I’ll pick up a bag upon occasion. My kids like them too. Finally, a candy that is what it says it is–even if it is vomit flavored.
I called in sick for tomorrow. I did have some chicken broth–and that tasted really good (?). And now I am so full I could burst. I like this diet, I must say.
Off to a hot tub (but not a hot-tub) and bed. I feel wiped out.
Swampy -hope you make it home ok. No going to Oz for you!
kai -life in AK sounds too darn exciting. Go lay down.
I also want (but know it would gastric suicide at this point) a choc pastry thingy what everyone else wants…
Hi eveyone! Nice to see we’re all having long busy days and other complications. Is the moon full?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. McCELLO!!!
(So have you identified Ali, yet, Heff?) And thanks for the reminder, meli.
Yay for Rebo!!! I think all that shopping is very appropriate.
Hope you’re both feeling better, rigs and jahdra.
Hey, Nava, what show is that song from? All my Puerto Rican friends sing it.
The catching cancer thing is classic Mom. “If she’d taken better care of herself…” And this is a woman with a degree in freaking biochemistry! It’s like all her science background melted away when she stopped working outside the home.
Oh and Heff, it means we’re members of a very special club.
So swampy, was there something you didn’t want to do? It wasn’t completely clear. And I second the vote for chocolate con churros. Yummmmmm.
Hi, Taters!
Glad to hear your job is going so well, taxi. It’s always nice to feel like you’ve found a place where you belong.
I started working at 5:30 this morning (still at home), got to work around 7:15, only took 1/2 an hour for lunch, then worked till 6:00 p.m. I was running out of brain power by then and figured I could go in early tomorrow to finish off the stuff that’s due to auditors tomorrow.
I’m tired, so, as usual I’ve forgotten people and stuff…
Off to bed, I think.
I think it’s almost Friday. Yay!!!
GT
Went out for Indian. Driving Husband had a car!
So full.
Hugs for kai. It’s good to hear from you.
Hi Heff! Life in Alaska is a never ending adventure of some sort. Of course, in Alaska an adventure is generally a horrible experience which doesn’t kill you and lends itself to storytelling. :rolleyes: Boy, do I have some stories!
rigs I spent most of yesterday slacking, and since it’s still pouring I did much the same today. Tomorrow it’s back to getting things unpacked, sorted, and what I don’t toss will have to find a place! Skiffman hates it when I become industrious!
Thanks for the hug li-li I needed it! As for your dance classes, woman, thy name is masochist!
The second half of the pork loin has been sliced into steaks and is simmering in the oven. It will be accompanied by stuffing (okay, it’s Stovetop!) and gravy, corn for the unenlightened and brussels sprouts for moi! Yum! Oh, and ice cream* for dessert. Being as it’s Thursday I will be watching CSI in a couple more hours.
*Did you know that Alaska residents eat more ice cream per capita than any other State? It’s true!
[QUOTE=anyrose]
pop
long day - consumed much coffee - suffered the consequences - off to rehearsal
my special birthday coding is on my home puter and I am elsewhere so here’s a realtively plain
[del]Happy Birthday Meli
[/QUOTE]
[/del]
oh crap - wrong person. At least I got the right couple, tho.
Happy Birthday, Alistair McCello!
I chipped my tooth.
Actually, I chipped it again. The first time was in summer of '02, I tripped on something and went down, face first, and chipped my left front upper. Only a corner, no exposed nerve. So, I went to the dentist and he filled it in and filed it down, and made it all better.
Tonight I was chewing on a caramel, and I noticed somethng a little crunchy. I spit the candy out immediately, and was suddenly aware of something wrong with my tooth. I looked in the mirror and saw a little corner of the chip (maybe the whole chip from '02) was gone. Now, I am very aware of it, and my tongue keeps touching it. This will drive me crazy until I get back to the dentist.
[QUOTE=gotpasswords]
Wildly popular with Harry Potter fans. They’re almost impossible to find whenever an HP movie comes out.
[/QUOTE]
Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean to be insulting. I just had no idea. People actually like vomit-flavored candy. Color me 
Well, after watching Poirot last night, my little grey cells were on the case. But rosie had me messed up because her clue was not in line with the others. Now that she’s changed her post, I have a better guess. I think it’s someone in meli’s family. But I don’t know if it’s a spouse, a child or an animal. . . yet. But since you clearly said Mr., I’m going with husband as my first guess. How’d I do?
OK, as long as I don’t have to do the special dance or the secret handshake because that’s where I normally fall out with other groups. When they want me to perform the sacred ritual and I refuse, they often kick me out.
rosie, I have a chip on that same tooth (in my own mouth, of course).
Heff - Mork? You seem to think like I do when picking out nicknames. Do I get a red jumpsuit with a big silver triangle on the chest?
Anyway, the extraction appeared to go okay, though evidently there was some difficulty in the extraction wherein some extra drilling and cutting needed to be done and stitches put in place afterwards. He prescribed some Tylenol 3s though (she had to ask for them) so everything seems to be okay. She can’t speak properly and had to eat cream of wheat for dinner 'cos she can’t chew, but that’s to be expected. So, all is well so far.
Oh, and Happy Birthday, Ali!
Okay, off to bed and into Friday.
[QUOTE=Mork]
Heff - Mork? You seem to think like I do when picking out nicknames. Do I get a red jumpsuit with a big silver triangle on the chest?
[/quote]
Yep. And that’s how I’ll be picturing you from now on. Nanu nanu.
Bummer about the extra drilling and cutting. That doesn’t sound pleasant. But I’m glad she’s ok and all is well so far. Please send her a healing nanu nanu from me as well.