Oh, you don’t know me at all!!! However, I looked in FCD’s office and found a small cardboard box that will be perfect. I just need for AuntB to wake up so I can get her address. I know it’s Avon, IN, but one needs to pay to get more than that online. A text is free and I’ll know it’s the right address.
It’s 7AM - guess I should shower and dress. No sense in putting it off any longer.
I have good news and bad news, but first…I’m OK with pumpkin pie. I change it the ratio of spices and replace a little of the evaporated milk with a good glug of bourbon. I liked it was rmed in the microwave. However, it’s not my favorite pie. The weirdest thing I saw pumpkin spice in was bologna. It was a major brand. (
“My baloney has a first name…”) It was a weird yellowy tan color. BooFae, the link didn’t work for me, but maybe that’s a good thing.
And I’m on team cool with socks. (I have Raynaud’s Syndrome.) I keep my apartment at 64º in a the cooler months.
OK, good news first. I have new contact lenses, and though they need tweaking and aren’t 100% comfortable, I can see a LOT better. My brain is refusing to get excited because I’ve had many eye things over the years that worked but only for a little while. Still, I’m cautiously happy. I haven’t had a lens that worked in the left eye for 8 years, and even then, my vision was poor, so this is a big step.
The bad news: I can barely put any weight on my surgical knee. I don’t know why. I did my PT exercises on Sunday but did very little walking. I woke up yesterday and bam! There it was. And I can’t move it as well as I was during exercises. Hopefully it resolves itself. If not, I have PT tomorrow and can ask then.
I get my RSV vaccine today.
FCM, it bears repeating: those are two cute kids! I hope FCD’s trip goes OK.
shoe, you might say, “Uffdah, that pizza oven is hot!” or “Another 6” of snow? Uffdah!" Also, YAAAAY on the license!
I didn’t know Hobbits played baseball. 
Vroom, congrats on the job!
71 newbies? Sounds like a recipe for blueberry jam.
Good morning.
It’s 53F and raining. It will rain all day in various forms (mizzle to downpour), and the expected high is 62F. They expect half an inch of rain throughout the day. In other words, it’s gonna be pretty soggy.
FCM, safe travels to FCD and MiL. I hope erranding goes smoothly, too.
nellie, I’m sorry your knee continues to trouble you. A cautious YAY! to the contact lens working better than others have done.
baker, that was not sad; as others have mentioned, you just wanted to do a good thing.
vroom, congrats on the new job!
Well, it’s back to work today, but I’ll need to cut out later this morning to pick up Polar’s cremains and paw print. Since Costco is near the vet’s office, I’ll exchange the two pairs of pants I purchased for my husband. I used to buy him a 32-inch inseam, but it seems these are too long, so I’ll exchange them for 30 inches. It shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes at the most, and I’ll consider that my lunch.
Nothing exciting happened yesterday; I took care of laundry and bedding and completed minor chores around the house. The rain started pretty much on schedule, so I was grateful that I had mowed the lawn on Sunday.
I had a restless night and didn’t get much sleep again. Consequently, when the alarm went off, I was really tired and didn’t want to get out of bed. I gave myself an extra 30 minutes and then got up, showered, unloaded the dishwasher, made coffee, and started the day. Now it’s time for another cup of coffee.
Take care, everyone.
Morning all. Slept well and awoke to 59F temperatures heading for 81F later today and still no rain in the forecast. May have to make a Wal-Mart run here sometime during the day, but nothing critical. Gym is also on the agenda, and coaching the littles (7-year old) soccer team will be on for this evening. Instant Breakfast has been (almost) instantly consumed, so that much has been accomplished.
FCM, hope MIL and FCD have a safe trip westward and that the phone makes it quickly.
nellie, happy for the good news, moderately concerned about the bad news; hope it gets better as the day goes along.
Pilot, know what you mean…hey, whattya mean I’m getting old!!! Never been better!
Vroom, add my congratulations from getting away from a toxic workplace and hopefully being somewhere you can grow into the job (and get paid more as you do).
Cupcakes, most everyone has already said it, you showing caring and understanding to what at best was a remote acquaintance is not a downer.
Butters, safe journey homeward.
OK, need to finish the morning internetting and decide what I am not going to do next. Take care all…
scandinavian version of “oy with or without the vey!” tone of voice conveys the meaning.
putting down a heavy item or getting a strenuous thing done. uff da.
hearing a sad tale. uff da.
“uff da, you wouldn’t believe my day.”
looking at a pillow destroyed by fluffy the destroyer of worlds. uff da.
if you hear someone say it, “you okay?” would be the proper response. their response may be “ya, you betcha”.
it is used in the more norwegian areas of the mid west.
I brain-farted on the way home and drove right past the post office. But I’ll pass another on my way taking Tobias home, so I’ll just leave a little early.
Once again, Food Lion was out of Diet Coke that’s on sale. Dammit. I may have to run to WalMart, since they have it for a tad cheaper and I’ll be down that end of the county this afternoon anyway.
But we’re back home and I’ll be throwing lunch together in about half an hour. Mostly chill so far.
Everyone showed up, so the heaving went well. I was over on the 300 slide, and one of the part time sups had signed in the computer. I can log onto the various programs. So Brown trust me enough to give me access to address changing programs, but not access to the Interwebs upon which they reside. Also when I came home Spot hornked up his first hairball. since he’s currently undergoing Screaming Tuxedo Zoomies, it’s just regular cat behavior.
This made me laugh so hard i couldn’t compote a reply.
I find a good glug of bourbon makes everything better.
Hope the knee feels better soonest. {{{{nellie}}}}
{{{{Taters}}}}
Tarzan thinks so. Safe travels!
Beaching was nice.
Just as that was wrapping up Her Ladyship notified me she was off to Daughter’s for at least the morning, so that cleared my decks for solo dining / wandering.
Just had breakfast at a nice waterfront joint a couple mile upshore. Eggs Benedict sorta: ciabatta, mozz, pacetta, egg, and pesto. Tres yummy. Also did a bloody mary & now coffee. Probably not an excellent habit to encourage, but fun for a change of pace.
Might swim & sun a bit here too in a while.
I too liked Nellies commnt. In your conveyor belt-heavy environment either definition of jam works.
Great comeback too there doggio. It’s hard to preserve my usually-sweet composure.
As I understand Midwestern culture, ‘uff da’ is more a Minnesota and further west (the Dakotas) thing.
ETA: oops! (Or is that ‘uff da!?) ninjaed by doggio. Too early in the day for me-haven’t had my coffee yet cause I’m pinned down by a purring Siamese.
Some parts of da UP does it too, eh. What I don’t know is how much da Yoop & da Mitten think of themselves as one state or two planets.
Have you tried Coke Zero? Don’t ask me what the ‘___ Zero’ diet drinks are doing differently from the ‘Diet’ diet drinks, but to me, they taste close enough to the real thing to make me happy, which I’ve never been able to say about any of the ‘Diet ___’ beverages. My wife really likes Coke Zero, and I like it as much as I like any non-diet cola. And I’m hooked on A&W Root Beer Zero.
Laundry day! At least they got one of the busted dryers back in operation, and we were early enough to snag three washers.
One of the hazards of living in a place like this is running into people that you’d just as soon not have to listen/talk to. Today, it was an old fart who lives down the hall, who was in the laundry room waiting for his clothes to dry. Now, this guy was a surgeon in his previous life and who did missionary work providing medical services. Very laudable, and based on that I would guess that he has a decent world view. Well, today he regaled me with a story of how he was sitting in the park the other day when four “obviously illegals” came walking by him, and how he was prepared to thrash them with his walking stick. 
In the interests of not antagonizing people here, I didn’t take him to task on any of it, nor did I obey my immediate impulse to just walk away from him. But he’s now on my list of people to avoid.
Dictionary claims tagup is a baseball term. Still in the corporate sphere, and I’ve never seen tagup before, but I’m in Switzerland, which is a very different corporate sphere. There used to be a daily meeting which was referred to as “morning prayers”, but that might have been imported from Australia.
The word tagup me of a snopes user named tagurit. Miss her posts.
Since I had Monday and Tuesday off this week, I can actually post before the weekly number of posts reaches triple digits!
I find pumpkin spice, at least what Starbucks likes to serve, to be too sweet. However, every time it gets to that time of year, I remember a friend of a friend who loved pumpkin spice lattes, and she wasn’t going to be able to wait until the season started. Somebody knew somebody and got her one last pumpkin spice latte, weeks before it would be sold at Starbucks. Cancer sucks.
A few weeks ago I started going to the gym on Mondays and Wednesdays. This week we went for a hike on Sunday, I went to the gym on Monday, per usual, and today we went for another hike. Tomorrow I will go to the gym again, but I think I’m ready for a bit of a break. My legs are tired. Really tired.
Happy job news to @carnut and happy one-step-closer-to-a-DL to @purplehorseshoe!
At most of my high school reunions, the organizers asked people to donate to make sure everybody could attend. I’d rather pay for somebody to go, who wants to go, than go myself.
As I grew up in a Norwegian Lutheran church (PNW, not midwest), I would translate it as “Oh no!” or “Oh that’s too bad”. It’s almost impossible to go to a service, and go to coffee afterwards (of course!), and not hear it at least once.
Sorry about Polar. {{{{taters}}}}
After spending a lot of money on traveling and other expenses, I’m trying to stick to a budget, but I got behind on my tracking. Need to go be responsible and catch up on my tracking.
Agree completely.
The Zero products are made with aspartame and acesulfame. Which taste pretty darn close to real sugar. Enough that lots of people besides you and I can hardly tell the difference between that and the regular full sugar/HFCS stuff.
The traditional “diet” colas started out with saccharine, then switched to mostly aspartame. Which has that very distinct “diet” flavor. Folks who are used to the “diet” flavor usually find the non-diet flavor “wrong” and off-putting. And vice versa.
The two categories, traditional “diet” and “zero”, are in no sense interchangeable products flavor-wise or, apparently, customer-wise. Industry stats indicate there’s not much cross cannibalization. The growing “zero” market share is coming from the non-diet products while the “diet” products are holding a steady share.
I concur that they’re not remotely interchangeable flavor-wise. But I’d think there’d be a fair number of people out there who drink diet sodas because they don’t want to entirely blimp out, and the diet beverages had been the best thing available even if they weren’t all that great. I’m surprised that there isn’t a decent chunk of that group that would love to find a zero-calorie beverage that actually tasted more or less the same as naturally sweetened.
For about the last two decades, I’ve been drinking sweet tea, but sweetened with sucralose rather than sugar. Which means I haven’t been buying any sodas at all until lately. (Actually, when diet cherry vanilla Dr. Pepper was briefly available in the mid-Atlantic, I enjoyed that, but they apparently decided it had only regional appeal, and my region wasn’t the region. A similar thing is going on now with A&W Cream Soda Zero; you can’t get it within a hundred miles of here.)
I’ve tried it but I don’t like it. FCD likes the cherry coke zero, but I don’t like that either. Hard to believe I used to drink Tab all the time back in the day.
Despite having GPS, FCD has called me twice for directions. At least this time he didn’t take the wrong exit and end up in Pittsburgh. He has a looooong history, even before GPS, of calling me for directions. Cracks me up.
Depends a bit on when that person switched from full-sugar to “diet”. If that was 20 years ago, “diet” is the flavor they associate with their last 20 years of cola drinking, and zero or full sugar would taste weird. Likewise my wife’s daughter who has only drunk the diet Pepsi flavor since she was a child and thinks “that’s what cola should taste like”. Lotta young women (or formerly-young women) in that boat.
Somebody who reluctantly took up “diet” soda last year would probably be overjoyed to learn of the zero products. Like you or me.
Back in the day I personally never worried about calories and drank not a lot of soda overall, but all of it was always full sugar.
Then over a decade ago came diabetes and I went to no-carb living, which included zero soda of any sort since part of my goal was to kill any desire for sweet tastes. It’s a lot easier to avoid desserts and sweet carby breakfasts when they actively taste weird or bad to you. Which sugar does if you can go cold turkey for a few years.
After enough years that sweet didn’t taste all that good to me anymore I wanted to try adding some soda to my mix: all water all the time was getting kinda bland.
I tasted diet soda and it sucked with that nasty chemically taste that diet drinkers think is normal and ok. So when the first zeros came out I gave them a try. I still only have one every couple weeks, but they taste like I remember the real thing tasting. Which is a tasty treat, but my overall interest in sweet has been dulled to the point that even 12 oz is getting thick, goopy, and off-putting. I wish you could get Coke Zero and A&W Zero in 7 or 8 oz packages.
Well, this is worrisome. I got a notification about the fuel tank I bought on eBay from the UK.
There was an issue with the delivery.
Oct 9, 2023 12:19pm
Exception: Undeliverable
Lichfield, Staffordshire WS13 8UR
Humans can be some of the most ruthless and cruel inhabitants of this planet … but when they step up, it’s amazing what the cooperation of good-hearted individuals can accomplish.
This IS the Dope, after all, so … cite, please?
(I’m mostly interested in finding out how you access “industry stats.” Is there a newsletter?)
Eons ago, our high school music teacher was telling us about how she (who lived in Dallas) went to Ft. Worth to visit her parents over the weekend.
"I figured I took the wrong exit when I saw a sign saying ‘Welcome To Oklahoma.’ "
I wanted to thank you for this bit of information. We carry Coke, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, and Cherry Zero at work. I’ve noticed that if we’re out of one of those and I offer a different one as a substitute, the customer response is usually either, “Nah, never mind” and no drink entirely, or they ask for a Sprite.
I always vaguely wondered why …
It’s chilly and The Oracles predict rain later. I’m sipping the last of my chicken soup, and contemplating my cross-stitch projects. I’m getting heartily tired of the “lilac bouquet” one I’m making for my mother - it just looks, to me, like a bunch of dongs in various shades of lavender at this point - but I’d like to at least finish it as a Christmas present.
Two nights ago, Monkey took his jingle-bell self across the street, again, to which I was alerted by the dulcet tones of a cat fight breaking out.
Between that, and the - so far, hopefully only - flea I discovered yesterday, SOMEbody is absolutely grounded. (The flea may have been courtesy of my uninvited visitor the other night.) So he’s alternating between snuggling on the papazan with me, or howling mournfully at the door.
Oh, here he is absolutely passed out on the “shelf” formed by one of the cushions, which puts him conveniently at shoulder/back of neck level to me, where I can feel his warmth & purring, and occasionally reach back to scrith him. (It re-starts the purr motor.)
