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Weekend wrapup

ritaxis: (Default)
Sunday, October 21st, 2012 05:38 pm
Yesterday I gave blood: went to the teacher's recycled junk store in Santa Clara: had a Filipino lunch that I chose badly for (Emma and I were too hungry to choose well and we both chose things that we wouldn't have ever liked, go figure): tagged along as Emma got silk embroidery ribbon: and went to Ranch 99 and stocked up on Japanese vinegar, kabocha squash, bean curd noodle (not bean thread), and macupuno (mutant coconut).

Today I finshed a draft of as creepy a story as I could have written while still having a kind of happy ending. And I have cleaned some of the fridge and I have tried to buy new drawers for it. The drawers are broken in front -- they are flimsy and I have bad door closure habits -- but they cost sixty dollars before tax and shipping from the manufacturer.  I did find them for 45.  But how can a badly made piece of plastic be so expensive?

There's something terribly wrong with my fridge anyway.  I have it set almost all the way to the coldest setting and it's still dripping water all the time and developing mold on the ceiling. I was happy with it till recently, though the door needs encouragement (maybe that's what's wrong with it).

Also I cooked: a massive baby bok choy and tofu stir fry with bean sprouts, mushrooms and bell pepper: a "kugel" of broccoli and onion (it's maybe more like a Persian kookoo), and I cooked the butternut squash that came from the food bank and I roasted strawberries, which was a mistake but I hope to make it all right.  Yeah, you;re going to say "roasted strawberries? What were you thinking? That couldn't end well." But twenty-nine million food blogs insisted that there was nothing better on this planet to do with extra strawberries so I tried it.  The strawberries were those huge blandish wet ones from Driscoll to begin with, but there were two pounds of them from the food bank and I made fine dried strawberries and jam from that kind in the past and they taste good plain with yogurt or whatever so I had some hopes. I'm gong to run them through the blendr and hope they make a decent sauce to eat with macupuno and almonds.

If you're wondering why I go to a faraway ethnic grocery store when I am also depending on a food bank, let me point out that I mostly only buy things there that are very inexpensive and I can't get here, and I only go there when I am running other errands on that side of the hill (like giving blood and getting things for work).

Also from the food bank: a pile of pears, which I am letting ripen for a bit and then I will dry them.

Also, I have not found Frank's UCSC diploma or transcripts, which I thought I gave to him ages ago but can't remember the occasion at all, but I did find a pile of other things useful for his application to foundation years (residency), and I scanned them and sent them to him.

He's applying to Malta and to Ireland, because their deadlines are now and  for various reasons having to do with bureaucratic failures he's more likely to get in there. I should be rooting for Ireland, but I'm kind of in favor of Malta. It's more exciting.  And Hana used to have a Maltese terrier.
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Plum madness nearly over

ritaxis: (Default)
Sunday, August 19th, 2007 12:04 am
Let's see. Canned plums, check: plum jelly, check. Chinese plum sauce, check: dried plums, check. Plum wine: in primary fermentation. Nice fellow will move to under apple tree tomorrow. I think there are enough good plums still on the tree for me to make more of the plum sauce (it's really good, though it's a color that would frighten you if you came upon it unexpectedly, or in a dark alley), or maybe that plum thing that personhead dragonet2 gave me the recipe for.

Sadly, after spending hours trying to figure it out, I do not have a name for the troubles the plum and apricot tree have. But I do have a remedy, short of euthanasia. So I have a plan, more or less, around that.

Plum madness ends just in time for apple madness to begin. Let's see: I have I think seven quart and three pint-and-a-half jars I can put apple juice into. I do not think this is a good year for me to make cider. Well, it could be. Dried apples are stupid, unlike dried plums which are cool. Apple butter, good, applesauce, better. Apple pie is wonderful. The only problem the apple tree has is worms, which I have been treating faithfully with codling moth traps to no avail. I don't think it's brown apple moth, because the moths I saw were different looking in ways I cannot remember.

Speaking of euthanasia, did I mention that the old refrigerator, which I have roundly hated for the last several years of its life, finally gave us an excuse? The fan motor gave out, or went moribund, anyway, and started making loud noises and stinking up the place with that burnt-motor smell. If your refrigerator does that and you like your refrigerator, you have it fixed. But that refrigerator had tiny cracks all through its structural plastic, and almost everything nonessential was broken: crisper drawers, the shelf that sits on them, door shelves, door handle . . . it was just hideous.

So we got a new one from Sears. We could not afford it: but we're breaking out the last bit of savings anyway to send the boy to Prague, and there's enough left over to buy the fridge. The nice fellow believes to the bottom of his soul that having black appliances is worth an extra fifty dollars, so it's black. To bore you with more details: it was the smallest non-stupid model they had -- 18.2 cubic feet (I know, those of you from countries where they use rational measuring systems are thinking, "what's next? is she going to give the energy usage in poods per fortnight?" but hey, I just live here). It was the least energy-greedy model they had. And let me tell you another effect of a Republican administration: several years ago when I first started daydreaming about replacing the refrigerator, the models that were on display at the Sears store were markedly lower in energy usage across the board than the ones available now. And they varied more. There were more sizes and there were more different options. Now most of the refrigerator models are humongous and take too much energy. One improvement is the almost-universal glass shelf instead of the annoying wire ones. They all had split shelves, which I think is a good thing. The vegetable drawers are tiny, though. I think a large head of cabbage will not fit in one. So I have retained one of the plastic bins I was using to replace the broken vegetable bins in the old refrigerator, and I've put it on a shelf and filled it with leeks, cabbage, carrots, and celery, the things that don't fit into the bins. Also went online and ordered an extra door shelf to put little jars of mustard and pickles and stuff on.

I love having a functional refrigerator and refrigerator light.

Now, if I can get the dishwasher freed from its prison, fixed, returned, and defended from groat, I will be happy.
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Freedom of Information Act (and Lord Flea)

ritaxis: (Default)
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 10:16 pm
So, if you want to know what files are being kept on you, you can get started here. But I couldn't find any place where it might have said whether you can request files on your dead relatives (I was thinking both of them).

On another front, I cleaned out the refrigerator today. Every so often it goes all the way to hell and damnation, and not just when I have mitigating circumstances like now. And anyway, a lot of what I had to toss dated from before the crisis, which is weird because I could have sworn I did this in December. Getting intimate with the refrigerator revealed that the molded shelves in the door, just like the vegetable drawers, the meat drawer, the handle, the shelf that goes over the vegetable drawers, is cracked in unfixable ways. Each of these parts has its own unique way of being broken. So I guess I'm getting a new refrigerator this year after all. I can wait for a sale. I know what I want: something small, energy efficient, with glass shelves, and black (because the nice fellow made us get a black dishwasher, stove and microwave/stove vent combination). I wish shallow refrigerators weren't so much more expensive than deep ones (and only available in extra-large and energy gobbling).

And of course you all know by now that there's a tape that proves that Bush did know about Katrina well before landfall, promised the Army, and then didn't deliver. From Frank: it's clear that the administration is intentionally fiddling while our cities burn, and it looks like they're also burning the cities.

On still another front, at the University today, I counted nine extra shaggy Bambis nibbling the new leaves right in the pedestrian path by the east remote parking lot, and then later I saw them crossing the road and wandering into Family Student Housing. I think they're extra shaggy because they're beginning to shed their winter coat. I think they're wandering around the people part of campus not because they are desperate for food -- this has to be one of the best times for deer around here but because they really like all that young juicy foliage and they have figured out that college students aren't going to make venison stew of them.

Though I did once, when I was a college student. It was road kill, though, which is different, and anyway we tried to save its life first.

ETA: One last note -- Skip Heller has done it again: Here is a remarkable clip of a "mento" musician from Jamaica, Lord Flea. The music is kind of like calypso, and Skip says it's a bridge between calypso and ska, but to me it sounds more directly African than either of those. It's also interesting because of the dancing. A woman who seems to be dressed in nothing much more than a fuzzy panama hat affixed to her butt comes onstage for a while and dances something that looks like voodoo religious dancing, and a man dances around with his banjo behind his head, playing it, and somebody (Lord Flea? or another person?) dances on sand (you know, like soft shoe dancing). It's really beautiful, in an inscrutable sort of way. The name "Lord Flea" is really reminiscent of calypso names.
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