Aren't we grownups here?

In one of our coffee rooms at work where we have a coffee machine, microwave ovens, toasters and a refrigerator there are some signs on the wall that make me wonder whether the people I work with got basic training from their mothers.

The one over the microwave ovens:
And one over the sink:

Are there really people who think that tea bags and stir sticks simply wash down the drain (well, by way of the garbage disposer)? Apparently there are enough people who do that a reminder needs to be posted.

Some wit thought others need the reminder and put a similar sign above the sink in another coffee room:

Now, the question on everyone's mind is "What the heck are Teradata trading cards?" I'll try to explain (and, of course, show you)!

Some time ago, the marketing people came up with some little CD-ROMs the size of business cards that had little slogans and images on them that illustrate various virtues of Teradata. When you put them in your CD drive, you're shown a little movie about the virtue. They sent these out to us in random batches of two or three cards at a time. We were supposed to trade our duplicates with colleagues to get a full set. I think that there were eight since they gave us a business card holder that hold eight cards in addition to a card with a summary of the virtues. I have eight so I guess I got the whole set! There was some sort of prize for people who sent in evidence that they watched all of the movies. I don't think I watched more than a part of one.

I'm pretty sure that these were made for customers.

Don't put these down the drain! (Only a couple of these are interesting.)

"Actionable Information"?

Grumpiness has subsided

We got our new Chocolate telephones. We had them charge while we had supper and activated them as soon as the charging was complete. They say to fully charge the phones before using them and they say not to use them while they're charging. That gave us a little time to read some of the instructions that are in very tiny print. Mine is Black and Jerry's is Black Cherry. As Jerry said yesterday, they don't sell a chocolate colored Chocolate. Go figure.

We got Bluetooth headsets for them. Now I can take my walks and talk to Mom without holding a phone up to my ear. Now I can look like a madman who is talking to himself. I guess these things are common enough that people using them no longer look like lunatics. But I will not walk around work (or anywhere else) with it on my head unless I'm actually using it. People who have to have their little headsets always hanging on their ear do look like lunatics.

We got removable memory for them. I haven't tried it out yet. We'd better be able to take pictures and move them to our computers without having to pay for the privilege.

Well, back to the tiny print. I have to see what more they can do for us.

Thanks for all the Customer Service stories. I don't feel so alone now.

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An Update (already): Jerry's phone is "Red" not "Black Cherry." These phones show fingerprints worse than stainless steel appliances. Jerry is making sure his stays nice and pretty. I hope he doesn't wear it down to nothing with all the buffing he's doing.

Verizon Wireless made me grumpy

We decided to get new phones for cheap in exchange for promising that we'll remain Verizon Wireless customers for another two years. It was not a pretty experience...

We went to a local store and browsed the gazillion phones and I started hyperventilating and we left. We shopped online instead. Their web store made me grumpy. I had to reenter information I had already entered when a reasonably designed shopping site would have remembered it for me. After re-re-reentering information I finally hit the "I'm done, let's pay for it" button. Their web site said that an error occurred and I had to start over. I started over and at the end the same error occurred. I did it a third time. This time when I said I'm done it showed me what I was ordering: six phones and six sets of accessories. All this time their shopping cart icon at the top of the page assured me that it had been empty. Then, their poorly designed shopping cart made it very hard for me to empty it and redo things yet another time.

Next day: American Express put a hold on the charge because I hadn't used that card with Verizon before and it raised some sort of red flag. Verizon took the hold to be a full rejection and they canceled my order. I called Verizon to try to straighten things out and first person I talked to transfered me to the money end of the business and was on hold for at least 10 minutes. The person there had no idea why I had been sent to her and she transfered me back to customer service. This customer service person tried to fix things and get the order redone but needed to call me back in the morning right when he gets in at 8:30. He never called.

I tried their online store again and it would not let me in. When I signed in it told me that I could not use that service and I needed to call customer service.

So I called back and spent an hour haggling with the nice person who was stuck with me. I reluctantly ended up spending more money than I had bargained for on the Internet but now that's done and I can put this all behind me. Susan, the very nice Verizon person, handles very unhappy customers very well. She deserves a bonus.

But there is a lot of residual grumpiness. The phones are supposed to be delivered tomorrow. I hope we like them. They have cameras for our blogging pleasure!

Pressing Issues

Ironing isn't my favorite activity. I don't seem to get to the ironing part of laundry day when there are only a few shirts to iron. Sometimes I don't manage to take the clothes off the line until I am facing the next week's laundry. (For those who might not know, we have a clothes line strung across the back of the garage by the washer and dryer. The only things I dry in the dryer regularly are the sheets and towels...nobody likes stiff sheets and towels.) So I usually amass two weeks worth of ironing. Often more.

Then I get overwhelmed.

But our iron doesn't! We have a Rowenta Pressure Iron and Steamer. (That link is to Amazon.com. I couldn't get a link on Rowenta's site to go directly to the iron.) Tonight I got to press eleven shirts and (only) three pairs of pants. I didn't have to stop to add water and I used tons of steam. It's a great iron and I think everyone needs one. We got it at Bed, Bath and Beyond with one of their 20% Off coupons.

Once upon a time I would haul out the iron (not this one) and ironing board while getting dressed for work and iron the shirt I was going to wear that day. That foolish approach just doesn't work with this iron. It's got a lot of water that it has to heat up and this iron takes a rather long time to build up the steam. But once it does it's good for dozens of shirts (I speak from experience) and a bunch of pants.

Think about this one if you are like me and need lots of steam for a long time.

(I'm running out of gadgets to introduce.)

No Possible Fatalities in Cincinnati

Roses will rise

Today we started to clean out the Bermuda grass from where we're going to plant a rose garden. There's no way to get rid of Bermuda grass but we're going to try anyway. Jerry's designed a nice garden needs to have a lot of ground cleared. We've got a bunch of roses coming from Heirloom Roses. We've got a long way to go. We're supposed to get a lot of rain tomorrow so no more digging this weekend. The roses are supposed to be delivered in just a couple of weeks so we need to hustle.

Things are drying out today

Our latest gadget is a Gardenmaster Food Dehydrator. Our plan it to preserve fruit and vegetables from our garden. And mushrooms from my bucket (if they ever do anything...they've made a lot of stems but no caps!).
Last night and today I practiced on some store bought food. I dried some bananas. They are tasty and I've eaten quite a few of these slices. I think I had something around three and a half bananas on the tray. Bananas need to be on a meshy liner on the tray and we've got only one of those so we can dry only one tray of bananas at a time. Here's a before/after picture of them.

At the same time I dried some apples. They go directly on the drying trays so I loaded up the other three trays with apple slices. I used our Good Grips Mandoline Slicer to slice the apples. I sliced them too thin and the dried apples are a bit too dry. (By the way, the slicer claims that I can slice tomatoes with it. I've tried and have only managed to mash tomatoes. Does anybody know the trick to slicing tomatoes with the thing? Oh, their online manual gives a suggestion. I think I'll stick with a knife.) Another before/after picture (more before than after).

Then I decided I wanted to try drying a vegetable. We got some carrots for my experiment. A book we got had a recipe for carrot chips. You slice the carrots, fry them, salt them and dehydrate them. It was way more work than it was worth. After I fried them I had to separate them, slice by slice, to sop up the oil. Then I had to place them slice by slice on the drying tray. The finished product tasted mostly like salty oil and had only a little carrot flavor. I don't think I'll try that one again. Yet another before/after composite picture.
I sliced the carrots with the Cuisinart food processor. But I loaded the carrots on the wrong side of the hopper and when I turned it on they were all pushed onto their sides on other side of the hopper and I ended up with strips rather than slices. It's just as well...that meant larger and fewer pieces to deal with (but there were a lot of tiny bits in there, too).

I'm looking forward to produce of our own to dry.

Cops say the darndest things

We have a real time map of traffic conditions that lets us know what sort of commute we're facing. It has spots marked where there are problems. You can click on the problem spots for details of the accident, pedestrian on the highway, debris in the roadway, and the likes. Occasionally there are nasty wrecks that involve fatalities. No, make that "possible fatalities." I guess police and EMTs aren't qualified to determine that a fatality has occurred so the details of the crash will say that there is a "possible fatality" until it is confirmed by the coroner. Once the coroner confirms the death the details are updated to say that the wreck involved a "confirmed possible fatality."

Once I saw a report of a wreck where the police apparently thought it involved a fatality but might not have been sure. That one had a "possible possible fatality."

Then there was a very bad wreck where four people were killed. That one had "possible multiple possible fatalities."

I wonder why they have to be so noncommittal.

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A minor update: You can check out the results of the Google search of the phrase "Cops say the darndest things" to see cop jokes. (Hey, my blog entry already shows up there!)

Esteemed order

Here is the invoice for the esteemed order of the ivory chess set, the concentric ball, Poss's Buddha, and more. It's hard to imagine that the chess set cost only $139.00 (even in 1969 dollars). I'm glad that they substituted the thicker quality chess set.And the shipping for all of it was only $6.00. Today when you have a pair of wool gloves shipped to you, you pay more than that.

Thanks, Mom, for this. It boggles my mind that you can find this sort of document after all these years.

Let's do the timewarp again

Last year I was having terrible pain in my right shoulder when I reached behind my back or tried to scratch my left shoulder. After a couple of months of having to rub my back against a tree when it itched I finally saw the doctor. He sent me to a physical therapist to deal with my shoulder impingement. My treatment was to do exercises to strengthen my back muscles to realign the bones in my shoulder. I got to string my Thera-Band bands around a post and pull my arms and shoulders back. After a short time I had gotten a lot of my range of motion back and could put on my belt without agony. I kept hitting plateaus and wouldn't feel that I was making any progress for long stretches (but I did keep making progress).

Late last year I thought that maybe I wanted to do some new aerobic exercise along with my treadmill. They say that rowers give you a great workout. And they work the back muscles. So we got a new piece of exercise equipment. We got a WaterRower.
So now in the mornings I jog for a while then row.

I guess because I'm using smaller muscles with the rower (and those muscles are not all that accustomed to being worked), the ten minutes on the rower feel about ten times longer than the twenty minutes on the treadmill. Time sure does drag along. (But it does seem to be getting a bit faster.)

Sonicare Toothbrush
Speaking of time standing still, there are times I brush my teeth before going to bed and it takes forever for those two minutes to finish. According to the toothbrush's manufacturer the brush gives me 31,000 strokes per minute. Occasionally when I just want to get in bed I feel each and every one of those 62,000 strokes. Those two minutes are agonizing.

Fun while naked

You know how whenever you start a new bar of Dial soap you always ask yourself "What would the 'Dial' look like from the inside of the bar?" For a while you think that maybe you can just hold the soap in front of a mirror but then you realize that you're still looking at the outside of the soap and it's just reversed. For the next few days at work you can't concentrate on your job and you don't contribute in your meetings. You're written up on your permanent record.

To help you keep your job and to let you finally know what the backside of the word "Dial" looks like I now present the Back of Dial:

Years ago I actually wondered if it is possible to wear down a bar of soap until the words on the top show through the back. I developed a process for using the back side of the soap and trying not to use to top. That is, I rub the back of the bar on me or my washcloth and try not to wear down the "Dial" side (but Dial will wash away). When this first bar gets to be somewhat thin I set its back side on a new bar of soap covering the word Dial. I continue washing the same way so that the new bar of soap is what wears down. If you had enough of the first bar of soap glued to the second one you can end up wearing though the second bar so that the incised "Dial" breaks through.

After my first success with this process I went on to my next quest. That was to get a bar of soap to say "Dial" on one side and "Dial" backwards on the other. This involves at least three bars of soap. The first one just to get one to glue to the second. You wash with bars one and two for a while but don't let Dial appear on the back. When the two bars are getting kind of thin you paste them onto a third bar. Now you wash it down till the Dial appears on the back of the third bar. If you're lucky the first bar will last nearly to this point and will wash away from the Dial of the second bar at the same time the back of number three is showing.

This is what the front that Holy Grail of Dial soap looks like:

I hadn't tried to do this for a long time ("been there, done that," you know) so imagine my surprise when I finished my shower this morning and discovered my accomplishment!

You, too, can do this. But only if you practice, practice, practice.

By the way, this is what a new bar of Dial soap looks like:

Keep clean.

Concentric Ball

Howdy, Poss! Welcome. Thanks for asking about the concentric ball. Here's a picture of it.



It's hard to get a picture of an all white subject that shows a lot of detail. The outside ball has a bunch of dragons snaking around the holes. They have some rather nasty looking fangs. Here's an attempt at showing a dragon's head. It does show up pretty well.



The first ball on the inside is not separated from the outside ball. I forget how many balls are in there. The ball is about two and a half inches across.

One year till inauguration day

And with a leap day thrown in it will be a very long year.

All the campaigning to be the twit's replacement will make the year feel very, very long. But at least it might give us hope for the future.

I had expected to be getting endless messages on the answering machine from Hillary and Barack by now but there's been nothing. I guess they've had to blow their budgets in Iowa. There are just over two weeks till we have to make our decisions. I'm going to have to start paying attention to what they've got to say.

(I had expected calls from McCain, Huckabee, Romney, and all those goofballs, too, since till recently one of us had been registered as a Republican!)

Don in "The Roswell Incident"

Thanks, Colleen, for the link to "The Roswell Incident." Don shows up in a couple of bits in minutes 35 through 38. I wouldn't waste your time on the rest of the show.

Hit that Play button and drag the progress indicator to 35 minutes or so and sit back and relax for a couple of minutes.

Ivory Chess Set

Here's the ivory chess set Don told Colleen about. The kings, queens and bishops are all different. The knights are basically the same with one facing right and the other left. They hold spears. The rooks are identical pagodas. There are eight different pawns with each side getting a copy.

Royalty:

Bishops:

From what I recall, Jack's mother gave Mom and Dad money to get the kids presents. I don't remember what the occasion might have been. The chess set is what I got.

One question I've had all these years: Where did grandma get her money?

What did my sisters get?

Goodbye Kitty

This allegedly is real.

I guess he doesn't like his siblings

Jerry and I were on our way to San Diego this morning and I saw the truck shown on its company's web site. I love misplaced apostrophes.

Update: Does it even need an apostrophe?

Don Montoya

Well, Mom's question about Don sent me to Google. Check out the cast of The Roswell Incident on the Internet Movie Database. I'm going to have to see if our local movie rental emporium has that one.

After more clicking: The external review of "The Roswell Incident" takes us to the review of the "Incident at Roswell" CD-ROM. Maybe I'll order that. But probably not. Could it possibly be worth $20 (plus shipping from the UK)?

Nothing much today

• The birdbaths froze over again
• The mushrooms continue to grow
• Bobby Fischer died. Don Montoya and I took up chess during the Spassky vs. Fischer tournament. I haven't given the game any thought since then (and didn't really back then).
• The brownies are still good (still haven't gotten to the mac-n-cheese)
• I had a nice nap
  

Otay!

Tonight we had buckwheat pancakes.

First, you have to turn your buckwheat groats into flour:
Don't they look good?
They were!

Fluffy Buckwheat Pancakes
From The Pancake Handbook, Ten Speed Press

½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup buckwheat flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, separated
1 cup buttermilk
¼ cup water
2 tablespoons butter, melted

In a large bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, buckwheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. In a separate bowl, combine the egg yolk, buttermilk, water, and butter. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients all at once, stirring just to blend. In a small bowl, beat the egg white with a whisk until it forms soft peaks. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.

Heat a lightly oiled griddle or heavy skillet over medium-high heat (375°F on an electric griddle). Portion ¼-cup measures of batter onto the hot griddle, spacing them apart. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until bubbles cover the surface of the pancakes, and their undersides are lightly browned. Gently turn them over and cook for about 2 minutes more, until the other sides are browned.


Usually, Jerry don't need no stinkin' recipe for pancakes. His pancakes are great and aren't quite this complicated.

By the way, we used recently milled whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose. They were good and better for us to boot!

Wanna get high?

I got high at lunch today! I set out with my new DeLorme Earthmate GPS PN-20 (their web site seems to be broken right now) and climbed the hill near work. The little GPS doo-dad recorded my every move. Here's a picture of my journey.Work is at the bottom of the trip and up the hill is toward the top. The graph at the bottom shows my altitude vs. distance. From my low spot to the top of the hill is about 500 feet (so I got a little high!). I was puffing for a while.

From a spot near the top I took this picture:
The foreground was burnt in the October wildfires and the buildings in the center of the picture is where I work. (Remember, you can see larger versions of the pictures by clicking on them.)

While I was at the top I chatted with someone who was walking his dog. A friend of his is the forest ranger who was in charge of the controlled burn that turned into the Cerro Grande fire. What a small world, huh? His house was down the hill from here and didn't burn.

HBtJ!

Tonight we feasted on macaroni and cheese and brownies! Yum! If you're looking for a low-fat meal plan just put down your mouse and slowly go back the way you came...this is not where you want to be.




Baked Macaroni and Cheese
From The "Best-of-All" Cook Book

8-ounce package macaroni
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
1½ teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon dry mustard
½ teaspoon paprika
2½ cups milk
1 cup (¼ pound) grated cheese
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Cook macaroni as directed on package, rinse and drain. Start oven at moderately hot (400 degrees F.). Butter 2-quart baking dish. Melt butter in large saucepan, stir flour in smoothly, adding salt, pepper, mustard, and paprika. When well blended, add milk slowly, stirring constantly over low heat until mixture thickens and boils. Add cheese and Worcestershire sauce, and stir until cheese has melted. Add drained macaroni and pour into prepared baking dish. Bake in moderately hot oven 20 minutes or until top is browned. Makes 6 generous servings.

Some comments: I cook over higher heat than "low heat." I want to eat sometime tonight. Crosse & Blackwell Genuine Worcester Sauce is "suitable for vegetarians." A quarter pound of cheese? Please! Use more. I was hungry and didn't let it get terribly brown but it was nice and creamy. Half a tablespoon of salt is too much for me. Six generous servings!? It's more like two generous servings tonight and two small servings for leftovers in this house!

The recipe for the brownies came from the back of the baking chocolate package. You've already got that in your pantry.

Yum!

Baby, it's cold outside!

I had to replace the water in the birds' ice skating rink this morning.



I'm sure most of you won't sympathize with me but this is Southern California. It's not supposed to get this cold.

BEA is profitable (for me)

BEA is being bought by Oracle. Oh, the capital gains!

Mush!

Another Christmas present is (apparently) coming to fruition!

For Christmas, Jerry gave me an "Espresso Oyster" Mushroom Patch from Fungi Perfecti. They gave it that name because their first choice for growing them is in coffee grounds. (Coffee! Coffee! All living things need Coffee!) They wanted me to accumulate three gallons of grounds to grow the mushrooms in. If I saved the pucks from our four double espressos each day I imagine I could have accumulated the three gallons in about six months. The mushroom spawn would have died long before then. So I did what had to be done...I went to Starbucks. They put their used coffee grounds in bags for us to take home and put in our gardens.

I put the grounds in a bucket and mixed the spawn in and put the plastic bag over it all. I spritzed it daily and in less than three weeks the first little mushrooms have made their appearance! Soon we'll be enjoying freshly harvested mushrooms.

Soon, we'll get sick of eating mushrooms day after day. We'll cover that later.

Here's a picture of the mushrooms. (Click on it for a close up...you can see the cutest little toadstools!)

The largest clump is about an inch across. But they've grown a lot since they first showed up a couple of days ago. They were about the size of coffee grounds (medium grind).

I hope they're not poisonous.

Amaryllis

The amaryllis that Mom gave us for Christmas opened its first stalk of blooms today!

Let's get started!

Gosh, here I am starting a blog. Colleen suggested that I do this to share my adventures with my various gadgets so that's what I'll do now and then.

Besides, there are times that I think I want to share something with friends and family but don't feel it's important enough to clutter people's inboxes. What better way to share unimportant stuff than a blog? I'm not much of a writer so this might be a failure but we'll never know unless I try.

Wish me luck!