(Old) It’s Time For A New MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Exactly.

Good morning, all! Today’s world of Education (maybe I should rephrase that since it spells ‘woe’) has gone ok. I started teaching my algebra class today and there were no students. This isn’t completely surprising as it’s early in the school year. But, most importantly, students do not have to come to class if they don’t want to.

This afternoon will be the usual weekly all hands on deck meeting and who knows what else. I’m beginning to think that I might even have time to make dinner. Oh, and I slightly rearranged my office space. I need a bit more movement and I’ll have it together.

22

Back from my $72 Aldi adventure. 80/20 ground beef is $5.19/lb!!! Remember the good old days when ground beef was a cheap meat product? I bought it because I want a couple of meatloaves in the freezer. It was balanced by poke loin at $2.09/lb - that will be cut into chops and roasts for future meals. The only things on my list that they didn’t have were comet or a similar scouring powder and frozen yellow corn (or any corn, for that matter.) So I’ll make a run to Food Lion after I build the meatloaves and slice up the poke.

This talk of car-sickness brought back a memory from OCS. (That’s Officer Candidate School, in my case, in Newport RI, summer of 1978.) A Royal Navy ship docked at the base, and my roomie Barb and I, among others, went to look-see and get a tour. Being among the very few females, we were invited to share in a pint or two. I passed, as I don’t much drink, especially before lunch, and Barb had 5. FIVE!!! As I drove us on the way back to out quarters, she had the good graces to stick her head out the window and barf down the side of my car. Classy, that Barb. While I took my poor Datsun to be washed, she slept it off all afternoon. Good times…

This weekend Daughter and SIL took the kids to ride bikes on base - nice flat area, sans cars. It’s pretty obvious from the video that Roxy needs a much bigger bike - 24” according to the charts I’ve seen. The only ones I’ve seen on Marketplace are either waaaay overpriced for used bikes or too far away. Not gonna drive 2 hours for a used bike, even if it was free. So, do I break down and buy her a new one?? Must discuss with spousal unit.

OK, lunch has been ingested - time to make the meatloaf…

23

They started paving today, laying down the first layer of asphalt. Very exciting to watch from our perch.

Puzzles puzzed, and body exercised. Our exercise person suggested trying arnica for my increasing arthritis woes. Anybody have success with this?

24

My word, that’s a lot of motion sickness! Swampy should have entitled this, “Puking through the MMP.” :slight_smile: I wasn’t motion sick as a kid but my sister was. Once we were a few blocks from home, and she announced she was going to throw up. Mom encouraged her to hold on, as we were almost home. Turns out motion sickness can’t be controlled by will alone. Mom never made that mistake again.

My former stepson got motion sick. His dad couldn’t handle the poor kid’s vomiting, so I had puke patrol. I remember running toward gas station bathrooms with a six-year-old tucked under my arm like a baguette. He outgrew it and later joined the air force.

Today I have nothing planned except to stay indoors out of the heat. Between the heat and inevitable smoke, I’ve long hated August, which I secretly call “Hell Month.” (I guess not so secretly now.) It hasn’t done my character any good: I’d like to personally shake every climate change denier in the world. Unlike poor Taters, we’re supposed to cool off to a high of 81 on Wednesday. I get Ms. Dog tomorrow night, so just in time. She hates the heat as much as I do, plus heat and sun are bad for me.

In other mundane news, my nephew–the one in MI with two adorable little girls–blew out his knee and will have to have surgery. I’m trying to imagine wrangling small children on crutches. Yikes. Luckily, he’s a nuclear engineer, so he can sit all day at work.

On a happier note, my son harvested 24 pounds of tomatoes in 24 hours…from THREE plants! The corn stalks are 11.5 feet tall. Shades of Sleeper.

Herald, happy cake day!

Cookie, the paving does look fascinating. How intense is the smell?

No, I’d say that’s pretty accurate.

So your real first day will be whenever students show up? You get paid anyway, right? And you’re all prepared for whenever they do!

Kaboom (Do I have that right?), you joined the MMP while I was gone, so I’m late in saying this but welcome! And congrats on starting off the work week with a win!

25

Doesn’t the quote go something like “Work fascinates me - I could watch it all day!!”

:rofl:

The freezer is restocked. Two meatloaves - roughly 1.25# each. Three BBQ sauced chops, four dry-dubbed chops, one BBQ sauced roast, one dry-rubbed roast. The roasts are small - probably less than 1/2#. but plenty for 2 of us with leftovers.

And in my indulgent grandmother mode, I ordered a bike for Roxy. Tobias is getting one for his b-day from his other grandma, so they’ll both have new wheels by mid-November. Now, tho, it’s time for a break.

26

I was clerking the 300 Slide today. And since we had slightly more than 2 people on the 300 Table, I could work mostly uninterrupted. The damages were light, but included the obligatory Home Despot order, a wayward Minnesota bound box of copy paper, and a car door. I did my Aldi run, mostly meats. Spot has had his dry, flavorless bits, and I’ve had my (frosted)dry, flavorless bits(with milk and blueberries). So it is naptime. I have no idea when the bin man comes for the giant compacting bin, as I am asleep when he is out and about.

“Bother.” - Spot

Talk about hurling through the French countryside! But hope the kid’s stomach and your nerves survive.

Happy Holidays!

Welcome back!

A horse walks into a bar, and asks the bartender, “On a triangle where short sides x and z meet at a 90 degree angle and Side Y is longest, which side is the hypotenuse?” The bartender answers, “Y, the long face.”

:champagne::partying_face::shortcake:HAPPY DOPERVERSARY HERALD!!!:shortcake::partying_face::champagne:

Mine was only $56, including the $5.19 80/20 for meatloaf. GMTA.

They are doing that overnight on the one road I drive to work on. Which should be fun, because it’s also the road where people walk in the middle of the road, ignoring the nice taxpayer funded sidewalks.

27

Been sorting old family photos for the past two days, noting on the backs who the people in them are. I realized that I am pretty much the only living person who knows this information, so it’s a good project to do. My niece will upload them all to Ancestry, and some I will send to my nephew, as his mother is in quite a few of them as a very young woman. The only problem with these old photos is that it’s doubtful that any of my kids will care about them, but if they’re online, then they at least live on if someone gets curious. No idea what we’ll do with the 20 years of print photos my wife and I have. The niece does have a piece of tech gear that can upload them very quickly, so maybe she’ll take it on.

28

It would be more accurate to say that I rejoined after an extended, enhanced, extra-large, wide-fit, grande hiatus, but since nothing and everything has changed, it feels like I might as well be a newb reborn. :slight_smile:

Minced moo around here varies wildly depending on location and brand. I’ve been getting cuboid lean prepacks of it on sale for $5/lb as two 1lb packs. It’s decent, but a bit tough, which makes kind of okay for burgers, but not so much for anything that needs the beef to be broken up, like the burritos I made last night, which had me stabbing at the meat with a spatula for like 10 straight minutes trying to get all the bigger chunks broken up. However, the best stuff, which I get at the meat counter of my work-local market, is now $8/lb (CAD) for lean, $9/lb for extra lean. I still get it when I can, because it’s very tender and cooks like a dream, but the price has gotten out of hand. (I used to get it there for $6.50/lb for extra lean just a couple years ago.)

29

It was getting a little late, and I needed some breakfast. These are options that are in rotation: Sausage patty and over-easy egg on one low-carb multi-grain toast (LCMGT) with margarine, bacon-and-over-easy burrito with shredded cheddar and Tapatio on a low-carb whole-wheat tortilla, ham- or sausage-and-American cheese omelette with sriracha, or mashed avocado (a whole one!) with garlic powder and salt on two LCMGT with margarine.

None of that sounded good this morning, so I made myself a sandwich (bread not toasted) with half of a sliced avocado, two thin slices of havarti cheese, endive, and a very red tomato. (The endive and the tomato were home-grown, and given to Wifey, RN by one of her patients.) That hit the spot!

30

I dreamed last night that my entire extended family was staying with me for a week, including my parents (who were still alive in the dream), and I realized I hadn’t planned dinner. In the dream, I had a huge freezer display case in the basement, but almost nothing was in it except for some freezer-burned meat. I found two pounds of linguini on a shelf but only one can of minced clams, so linguini with clams was out. I also found a box of something called “beef stew lasagna” but a) ick and b) it served four.

I woke up before I could resolve the dilemma. It doesn’t take Freud to figure out that dream (if you believe dreams have meaning).

31

at the family gathering for pascha after my mother passed, we had a “what child is this?” and “who is this human?” go around with pictures i found. luckily, some people remembered outfits, “i bought that cute outfit for the baby” or “that was auntie’s favourite dress”. the best was “goodness, is that grandpop with hair???!!”. my mother did label some of the pics. she proudly used her manual typewriter!

we had another round after my aunt passed. she had some very interesting scrapbooks tucked away.

32

That’s lovely. Once, when I was a clutter-cleaner, I uncovered a box of photos. A lot of the shots were six or seven iterations of the same pose: here we all are at Thanksgiving dinner; here we all are in front of the Washington Monument. I suggested to the homeowner that they distribute these duplicates among the people in them, or their children, or whomever might be interested. They did, and it brought a lot of smiles, as the homeowner later informed me.

I never got carsick as a kid, but OMG – and what timing; I was just discussing this last night with my sister – did I hate that car seat. And looking back, I think I was right to not like it. It wasn’t like those padded nests people have nowadays. It was a block of hard plastic for me to sit on, and a kind of shell, also of rock-hard plastic, that sat in front and on top. Like Captain Pike’s chair, in that classic Trek episode. It was crawling with static electricity, it didn’t allow much play for my arms, and I suspect that in an accident, it would have done more harm than good. I might have been slammed up against it and gotten internal bleeding/bruising, or it could have shattered and impaled me. I think it wasn’t any safer than a regular seatbelt, except that I was too small to wear a seatbelt properly. Also, ISTR that I was made to sit in it long after I was big enough to wear a seatbelt.

Anyway, we had quite a weekend, but I’ll get into that later tonight.

33

I don’t want to hijack things here, but I remember after my mother died I asked my sister what happened to all the boxes of slides that my mother had, because I could use my flatbed scanner to turn them into digital photos. She had no idea, so I’m sure that my mother, ever the minimalist, threw them all away. :grimacing: I did find a very few that I turned into prints.

34

We’ve tried it, and it has no effect.

We decided to take a midpoint break, and we found a room in a hotel.

This hotel.

This room.

So I think we’ll be okay.

35

Sure beats Motel 6!

That is beyond cool!!

36

Sorry kid, but the puking was worth it for that hotel!

37

It means it’s time to order pizza! :grin:

38

Hahaha! :joy: I thought of that in the dream, but for some reason, I felt compelled to make a home-cooked meal. My subconscious is a hard-ass.

39

Wow! That’s amazing. Glad the puke-fest led to some good end results.

We’re slinging rocks around.
Imgur
And my sneaky plan of feeding the pex through the existing conduit worked. So yay me!

40

Hey - we’re playing with pex, too! Tomorrow we’ll try to feed it under the floor to the aft head sink. Hoping we can do it without having to remove the terlit. Working on a boat is always an adventure…