Food & Cooking
Recipes, Food Experiments and Commentary, Etc.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Jay: Shopping List
Don’t mind me. This is mostly composing aloud of my list of things I need to get at the store, following a quick run to the post office with another sold book. The budget for the grocery run is $25. Diapers should take $6.49 of it, unless I buy them elsewhere and juggle other money toward them, which is possible considering how ideal Market Basket is for buying food itself. I can look at this list here from the store if needed. Hooray for technology!
Besides the errands, I’m still working on the office, and today playing with some web and database code, which may be significantly easier than I had anticipated. Since working on code, be it that as a possible project, creating a portfolio of what I have done, or trying to dredge out stuff I can complete and make available, or fiddle with to learn more, means needing to hook up at least one additional computer and improve the lab environment, the office rearranging project goes hand in hand.
I still haven’t heard back on the contract I interviewed for. I need to e-mail the guy there and others. I did hear from the bank, where my online banking has never worked. Before they escalated it, they had me try it live on the phone to capture a server log of the attempt. It’ll be interesting to see what the problem is. I have to wonder if it’s FiOS or my router the FiOS comes through.
Anyway, what do I need to remember?
Meat. Depends what is on sale. We have none, period, and can use chicken and ground beef, for starters. Pork or unground beef are valid options. I could easily buy $50 of meat to restock, before even getting to anything else. With the dairy ban for Deb, we shoot for high fat more than we normally would.
Potatoes
Carrots (best price is there, or I might skip)
Beans, maybe lentils too (almost out of 64 oz bag of pintos, out of all else but split peas)
Frozen veggies (just a few cheap bags to interrupt the drought)
Cheese
Milk (not out, but cheapest place for it)
Pasta
Spaghetti sauce
Possibly some fresh veggies, sweet potatoes, butternut, or fruit depending on prices or sales
Bread
Yeast
Sugar
Maybe coffee creamer
Maybe coffee
Maybe tuna (goal of kids actually eating)
Maybe tomato soup (ditto)
Butter if still low there (ditto - Sadie can tell the difference, eats bread plain rather than with margarine)
I know I’m forgetting something and I’ll remember as soon as I walk out into the kitchen. I hope.
There are things low, like ketchup and rice, that can wait. I can do scratch rather than needing Bisquick.
Vegetable oil (using a lot where I’d put butter or margarine in pan to fry stuff, avoiding dairy)
Honey
Peanut butter, if they have a good price
Oatmeal, ditto
That may actually be it. It’s just that the innocent entries for meats and veggies could easily overwhelm the whole thing. Then if there’s a must have sale, that adds to it. Since I lost the flier, I should see if it’s online the way most are…
Huh. It appears Demoulas Market Basket supermarkets have no web presence. Weird indeed.
Anyway, off to it before the day slips any further.
Update:
I found the paper flier for this week. They have some nice sales, especially on beef and hamburger. That helps.
The kids are having a trauma over who will go with me…
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Jay: Who Knew?
I started to write about the interview today and have no idea what I was saying, looking at what I started earlier. The short form is it seemed to go okay, I was more nervous than the last one, got a little more experience and prep for next time, and I should know this week. I had no idea what to say I expected. I’ve had $25 - 30/hr in my head as a likely range if it’s not really lowball, and if it isn’t relatively higher than I’d expect for the nature of the work. I’d take it for less at this point, despite being contract, and I’d be delighted if it were more.
The place was easy to get to, not that far really, and the people seemed great. The products involved sounded quite cool.
I overdressed again, but it’s hard not to. Once I am dressing uncasual, putting on the full regalia feels like putting on a uniform. I know it matches. I know it’ll never be unacceptable. Deb says it seems natural on me, which actually makes sense.
Anyway, one thing I took away from the two interviews, to my surprise, is that had I kept even a little more of a hand in programming, I could either waltz into a programming job, or more easily get one that might potentially tie into that. I’ve been wanting to play around more with some new things, like some of the web development options, but I had no idea I’d come across as being painfully close to the droid they were looking for.
And that reminds me of the observations people have made about me. When I am writing code, it’s like watching unadulterated joy, to interpret one of them more poetically. One of the best programmers I’ve ever encountered, a former partner, scoffs when I belittle my own ability and potential in that area, and works well with me because I understand him. Which in a sense is a more generic thing - I can supervise and orchestrate programming work.
It’s one of those ultimate things that’s hard to enter into halfway, though. I have trouble if I can’t write in an uninterrupted stretch until the thought is out. I even have trouble prepping, planning, even cooking food with excess distraction. Not as bad, in a way, but you can’t engage me in conversation when I am, say, cutting stuff.
Still, I’ve wanted to dabble in it, playing guitar, as it were, but thought it would have no point, so I didn’t. I’ve even felt guilty about wanting to, be it generically playing with a language, or modifying an old program. The closest I’ve come, since I last tried doing code for the old business, was modifying, and wanting to modify somewhat more, the painting program for kids. Sadie learned to mouse with it, and still plays with it some. I’d been thinking I’d clean up some test code, change a couple things slightly, make it so you could toggle easy mode where moving the mouse draws without holding down the button, and make it available for download free.
Thus the title. Who knew that programming might have been something I could hope to get into? Or that a strong interest in it would be helpful when interviewing even for work that didn’t seem related.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Jay: Tuesday
In case I don’t get time to post in the morning, I do have a couple birthdays to post later, and will presumably have an interview experience to mention retrospectively. I’m due in Needham at 10:00 AM for one, where I should also get to see the former colleague who has been responsible for getting me two interviews so far.
The truck is gassed up. It’s about 38 miles each way, which is expensive these days. It’s momentum, anyway. Temporary or not, I feel good about it.
I also have at least one tiny bit of client work expected next week. A little grocery money, anyway. Speaking of which, tomorrow I need to stop on the way home for Benadryl for Henry. He needs some most days. At least today we confirmed he is bothered significantly by the bath. Even Valerie seems to have been affected by it. Either there’s residue or growth that’s not obvious and hits hard, or something about the water itself, or something about the tub itself. In retrospect, this started when he started bathing in the big tub.
Tonight no soap was used while he was in there, and the temperature was reasonable. He went in there fine. He came out as rashy as he ever gets, which is in proportion to the length of time. It seems worst where he most touches the tub, counting that he gets on his belly and crawls/swims around. The thing is, his very worst spots are where his face gets washed regularly, usually with just a damp cloth - water with no soap, plastic, rubber, etc., and a cloth that shouldn’t hurt him that gets laundered in detergent we have no evidence hurts him, as it shouldn’t.
Further experimentation will follow, obviously, including no baths some days, either at all or going in the shower with one of us instead, and the cleaning to end all cleanings.
It remains clear that he handles bananas badly. It remains clear that something happened that was most likely related to dairy - probably a specific package of cheese and its histamines - or eggs, and was more topical than internal. It’s unlikely now that either Deb eating eggs or him eating raw pears was a factor recently. It’s unlikely he was bothered by anything he might have ingested in trace amounts yesterday. It’s clear that washing his hands with Dial was bad. It’s clear that he reacts either chemically, texturally, or both to some of the screen printing on my T-shirts. He can eat rice, oatmeal, apples, butternut, carrots, and unofficially peanut butter and raisins with no apparent issue. He’ll probably get to eat sweet potato tomorrow, as I made extra tonight to save for the purpose. That’s likely to be fine, too. But you can see how confusing it would be to feed something, then have him broken out in rash in the evening… after a bath.
Stay tuned for another exciting episode of As the Rash Reddens…
Jay: An Adventure
I tend to get to Friday and say “gee, I didn’t get X, Y or Z done, but hey, I have all weekend and can plow through it.” Then I get to Monday and wonder what the hell happened. It’s like that, and all I can say is I maybe didn’t go backward, so that’s relief.
Henry and I went to grandma’s house for dinner and birthday cake for me and my mother, which was fun. He seems to like my older brother, of all people, though he was friendly, or at least not freaking out, in general.
My information conveyed Saturday about what he can eat, centered on absolutely no dairy yet, didn’t filter through to prevent the butternut squash from being mashed with butter before it hit the table. The mashing part being kind of bad too, as it renders it something he can’t pick up himself. That left him able to eat chicken. And the puffed rice I brought. In practice he ate a pile of the chicken, a little rice, a pea or two, and a bunch of the puffed rice. The chicken was cooked in rice with chicken broth, green pepper chunks, and whatever flavoring. At some point it had gotten a little margarine, which was the only concern. The peas had some kind of buttery sauce, apparently one of those frozen packages, which included pearl onions. He stole a couple of them and some of the rice from my plate, after which I gave him a bit more of the rice.
I hung out there quite a while, because he ended up sleeping like a log in the car seat, up on the dining room table. He’s slept a few minutes of the ride there, after staring at me like I was betraying him for making him sleepy. On the way home he didn’t sleep. In both cases, he seemed to enjoy the ride and change of scenery.
It doesn’t seem like food bothered him. However, he got rashy after his bath. It’s increasingly apparent he is either sensitive to Dove’s sensitive skin variant, or something in the tub bothers him through contact, which would be less of a surprise.
Speaking of the older brother, we had a funny conversation that almost got his head bitten off.
He was telling me I might have to take just any job to support the family, doing something I don’t like. He compared his guitar playing with my using computers. He could have spent all his time playing guitar for the past 20 years, but that wouldn’t have made money, which in his case comes from working on cars. So I’ve wasted all that time “playing” with computers, and may have to accept that now I will have to just do “something” for work.
This would be like telling him he’s been wasting his time “playing” with fixing cars for decades, and instead of finding work fixing cars, he ought to get a “real job” even if he hates it. Too funny.
I left it at “good thing my work and hobby are the same” and “what do you think I’ve been doing for a living since 1992.” Probably did a decent job on the “you’ve got to be kidding tone” and the silent “you dork” trailing clause.
Anyway, it’s insanely late already. I rousted the girls from bed before they were ready this morning, in hopes of resetting their clocks so we’re not fighting with them at 10 PM about actually Getting In Bed and Staying There. This seems to have resulted in a cranky Valerie. Oh wait, she’s unchanged. Never mind. Off to the races…
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Jay: No Birthdays Today
Well, not in my calendar. Surely there are some, somewhere, for someone.
Today I am going to attempt to take Henry to my grandmother’s with me. Valerie had a recent turn. Sadie refuses to learn to use the big toilet, even though she’s getting too big for the potty, and we’re requiring her to do that before she goes visiting where that’ll be the only option. He can eat regular food, for limited values of same, so it’s his turn. This is the obligatory one for birthday cake for me and my mother, since ours were on Thursday. I need to get moving soon, as it’s starting to be late.
Ah, I hear kids.
Speaking of which, Sadie thought not being able to drive our new car until we “pay tax on it” (registration) was about the craziest thing she’d ever heard.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Jay: Birthday and Many Things
So yesterday was my birthday. And that of a lot of other people, now up to a total of seven on that day in my calendar. That may be the largest number on one day. (Pauses to check, because he’s such a geek, finds that it’s tied with July 28, but no other day has more than five so far.)
It would have pretty much sucked - well, it did - apart from getting a car, and a substantial donation.
My left knee, and to some degree my thigh, have been killing me beyond all reason. It may or may not be connected to gout, which had been quiet recently until today, when I seem to have a minor touch of it in my right foot. Nothing like it was. The knees have bothered me before, over the years, and can be sort of twisted easily, or hurt by kneeling on a hard surface, or standing in place too long (I tend to need to sit, or move around extensively, after sufficiently long food prep, for instance). This has been unusual, and tough to keep away because of the kids and the need for activity that stresses it.
Ironically, sitting in this chair tends to bother it, while taking a walk tends to help it. Stairs? Excruciating, once it’s flared up, bordering on impossible.
That was making me extra cranky. Part of today it was better, but we have kids and stuff. They are pretty much a guarantee I can’t take it easy on the thing, and Valerie managed to add a bit of back to the mix yesterday by doing a backward somersault off my lap and being prevented from landing on her head.
Speaking of Valerie, she needs to learn to tell us when she’s bleeding, rather than being fascinated by the artistic possibilities. Keeping a bandage on would be good, too, once Dr. Dad has ruined her fun.
So yeah, a car. My aunt got this silver/gray 1994 Buick Century with 86k miles on it in 2003 at a good price. She drove it to 174k miles, replaced it yesterday, and brought it to us.
She seriously downplayed its condition and overstated its degree of foibles, I think. It’s beautiful, body looking at least as good as he one on the ill-fated van of the same model year. The foibles are things like a fan blade on the AC being broken, so you have to turn it off and back on strategically. I seldom use AC, even in a vehicle that has it. The trunk apparently can leak some in heavy rain. There can be a little trick to opening the rear doors. There are rear doors! And room for three carseats, of which they left an extra, a spare of my mother’s, in the car. It uses a quart between oil changes, and she keeps it to 65 on the highway. We’d mainly use it on local roads, very limited driving to places we’d need to go together.
The trick now is to be able to afford to register it. That’s a tough one. My aunt is getting the form to declare it a gift and save us the sales tax, so that will help.
I’ve always been particularly fond of my mother’s sister, who is only 17 years older than me, but this is just amazing and a huge surprise.
Anyway, I parked it where we’d been parking the truck, moving the truck up into the main part of the driveway. We’d been using two spots deep in the driveway, then hogging a third, spare spot with the Sentra. That wasn’t considered a favorable spot due to the mulberries, and really neither is at least one of the others.
Today I got home from dropping off a trickle of rent to the landlord, ran into the gal upstairs, and she had moved her car so we could have our other space back, having seen that we got a second car. The very same day, they swapped his truck for something better, very nice. Funny how things synchronize that way.
I was amazed, as I figured we’d lost that spot fair and square. The spot we’d hogged with the old Sentra has a trailer in it now, which works out perfectly. They can be funny sometimes, in their youthfulness, but once again, the people upstairs are great.
What else?
I ended up doing a lot of dishes and cleaning. I took Valerie on errands with me, to the post office, Benny’s, the bank, and Stop & Shop, where her bladder almost made it through the entire lengthy trek. I was threatening to make myself birthday brownies, with a mix on hand, but never did get around to it.
That would have been no fun for Deb. On the off chance stuff bad for the baby translates into breast milk, she’s been off the likely suspects, bringing them back until it’s just eggs and dairy. She ate a single egg, in a sandwich with ham. He got rashy the next day. It’s back off eggs long enough to let him clear up and test it again. It could have been random environmental, or something stray he ate courtesy of the girls. He also tried pear, and while there’s room to wonder, that’s one of the least likely problem foods. I’ll give him more this weekend and see, maybe.
I did splurge on flour tortillas, so we had chicken burritos for supper. That was popular. He’s had seasoned chicken since we started reintroducing stuff, but I cooked a little chicken by itself for Henry, just salt and a little pepper. He loves chicken.
For that I pulled out a tiny frying pan I never use, big enough to fry a single egg, and now I want to use it again and own more like it. It’s stainless steel with a thick copper bottom. Yeah, I needed more oil than I am used to using, because the second I turned on the burner, it seemed, the pan was sizzling hot and the meat wanted to stick to it. But oh, it cooked so nice. I think I’m in love.
And hey, the non-stick pans are starting to lose their mojo. They end up with a spot in the center, where the heat focuses, that the coating loses its ungrip. Once that gets serious, you may as well have a traditional pan. The really bad one is Deb’s deep frying pan with a glass cover, which gets used constantly. I wouldn’t mind having more than one of those, including a larger version, if I were outfitting the kitchen more completely.
What else?
Today was better. Overnight was weird, in that I was up most of the night, but during that time the knee was better, after a couple hours of sleep. The very best thing for it is to lay down a certain way on the bed. I can coddle it some laying on, say, the floor, but the bed is better, and then sleeping while it rests is better still. It got worse again as the day progressed, but it does that. While it may be nauseating at times today, last night I experienced a revelation of understanding how someone can pass out in response to pain.
Ibuprofen is shooting up the “must buy some” list.
I have an interview Tuesday in Needham. That’s a Good Thing. Same former colleague who landed me the main interview Monday got me another, but this time it’s his own employer, for a 2 - 3 month contract supporting a new software rollout. Beyond that there hasn’t been much activity, besides a ton of additions in LinkedIn and correspondence stemming from that, including with my last manager from VB support, who was awesome.
I did up the root of elhide.com to be a resume links and simple supporting text page, to give it the shortest possible URL without setting up a new domain. Plus elhide.com is more memorable than, say, gphmo.com. Which stems from when I was going to setup a new business as “Geek Practitioners.” The HMO in this case, besides a play on the medical theme, stood for “home, mobile, office.”
Still have to do a blogging-oriented resume. Still have to retrofit the blogs with “hire me” sidebar sections prominent. Still working on the odds and ends side work, but that’s going a little slower than expected.
Anyway, off to bed, I guess. Wanted to do a post for the day and talk about the birthday and the car and such. Got delayed and now it’s after midnight, but oh well.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Jay: Apparently
I hit just the right food combinations yesterday for the kids.
First, I had bought 3 Bartlett pears on sale, sneaking them into a “can’t get everything I need and must keep it under $10, preferably under $7 in case the debit card doesn’t work and I have to use cash” grocery order, and the girls split one like they were discovering fruit for the first time. It was especially good, perfectly ripe.
Shortly after, at their request, we had grilled cheese and red soup. The latter being what they call tomato soup. Which was Wal-Mart’s house brand, and quite good. They each devoured completely half of a grilled cheese, made with colby jack, cheap bread and cheap margarine. Since we can’t afford cheese, but still have to buy some, and are using it slower while Deb avoids dairy, and I’m nervous about my beloved cheddar after the allergy incident in which it’s about 80% probable the specific batch of cheese plus pre-sensitization were to blame (I didn’t know cheddar could be loaded with histamines) and I reacted to it or something too, we’ve settled on that kind. Wal-Mart’s is good, and it makes great grilled cheese. One devoured all and the other most of a third or more of the can of soup. I gave each of them at least as much of it as I had.
Then when I was at a total loss for supper, Deb remembered I’d mentioned blueberry pancakes the night before. We still had part of a bag of frozen blueberries my father had gotten for Sadie, knowing her love of blueberries. Most of it went into an astonishingly good blueberry cake a while back, which oddly enough left the kids indifferent.
There was exactly a cup of Bisquick remaining, enough for half a standard batch, without stretching it or making scratch. I made that up for them, figuring they might not eat it all and that would be part of what I had. Using an eight cup measure to scoop relatively uniform pancakes, I made 12 of them, heavy on blueberries, ate one myself, and between them they ate all of the other 11. Sadie ate 5 2/3 and Valerie at 5 1/3 of them, with plenty of cheap fake syrup.
That’s just nuts, compared to their normal, or at least recent, eating, especially Sadie’s. She’s been doing a lot of living on moonbeams. And afterward she pleaded still hungry, at least enough for several jelly beans.
In between, they each got a green apple lollipop from the post office when we walked there. You may remember we have books for sale, and there was an order for one to go priority, rather than the usual media mail. Not only did the guy at the post office give out lollipops, he had me stuff the original package into one of the “if it fits, it ships” priority folders, to make it $4.60 instead of $7.50.
Too bad having a full belly didn’t prevent a total meltdown by Sadie, for no apparent reason, late last night. She did make the breakthrough of calming herself enough to be coherent, so that’s good.
And speaking of cheap bread, we fell in love with Stop & Shop’s cheap bread, in 3-packs for $2.69, so it’s the best price as well as quality. I went in there the other day, read the package and found it has no milk or egg, so bought that rather than making more dairy-free bread myself just now. But… it went up sixty cents, to $3.29, just like that. Wow! If bread everywhere else, in single loaves, stayed that same, that makes them comparable. I have to assume there was probably a generalized increase. But 22%?? That’s going to mean the cheapest breads start to approach $1.50 a loaf. Perhaps it’s not generalized. I’ll have to look, just to find out.
My next mission will be to persuade the kids that soup is still soup and can still be eaten even if it’s not tomato. I have three cans of chicken noodle, which they ought to like, if I carefully promote it and make sure they know what it is. There are some other cans that the three of us can eat.
Speaking of allergies, we tried reintroducing eggs to Deb starting last night. The two of us had fried egg and ham sandwiches. Eggs come out odd on non-stick with no source of grease, but it was still good. Within a few days we should be clear that it’s okay for her to have them, which will leave only dairy, which makes it not too bad.
Henry can now eat oatmeal, rice, butternut, apple, chicken, and carrots. I really need to hit the store with money enough to buy chicken this week, as it’s on amazing sale, and hello, he can eat it and it’s a nice boost from the veggie kingdom. I was thinking of trying the pears next, but I doubt they’ll last long enough. They’re a safe bet, anyway. We still have sweet potatoes he could try next, and that’ll cover the major orange food group.
Oh, peanut butter and raisins appear to be safe for him, too. He has sisters. Apparently the main reason not to give him peanut butter is ability to eat it without choking, because he’s managed to get some twice.
One of his biggest problems seems to be my printed shirts. Part of it’s an abrasion factor, on the heavier, rougher prints, but the ink can also contain stuff that can bother some people. Given that we know he is bothered severely by bananas, and that probably means a latex allergy, the ink thing would be no surprise.
I’m rambling. Need to get more coffee, and at least make it so the girls will wake sooner rather than later. Last night I was threatening them with an earlier bed time, starting with waking them early today. I didn’t, but it’s about time even for not so early.
Jay: Happy Birthday
To me! An amazing 47 years ago, near this time, a modest walk from this place, I was born on my mother’s 26th birthday.
Apparently I was born hungry, because at 5 days old they were supplementing me with cereal.
At 17 days I went into the hospital in Boston with meningitis, for 11 days, and unexpectedly lived.
Henry is a mirror in more than appearance, as I apparently had a similar personality. I also talked fast, walked fast, and was apparently way ahead until about four years old, when I slowed down to the point it seemed there was nerve damage.
Anyway, mostly to me it’s another day, though there’s a brownie mix I’ll probably make in lieu of cake. I might try making a scratch cake, but we’re low on flour and it might have to wait for me to buy more, and someone gave us the brownie mix, which has been calling to me.
I am getting one big birthday present, the timing of which is coincidental. My aunt is picking up a new car today, and is giving us her old one. She says it’s big enough to fit three car seats in the back. If I keep feeding Sadie like yesterday, perhaps she’ll get to 40 lbs soon and be able to get a booster instead. A shame we lost one of our parking spots to the upstairs neighbor. And that we can’t afford to register it until whenever. Then again, the neighbor is using the two spots most directly in the line of fire of the mulberries, and the big car will be easier to get in and out of the driveway near the street.
That should be good enough to do what the van couldn’t even handle, simply getting us to my grandmother’s or brother’s or other local places as a whole group, without heavy driving in between.
Anyway, enough with the post. I need coffee, and to work on the “how to pay some rent next week” project.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Jay: Dreams Are Weird
I haven’t seen my stepsister in years, yet she was in dreams two nights in a row. Night before last, there was a mishmash of stuff that included one of my father’s houses, the dream version of it, which in the dream she’d ended up buying. Last night’s dreams included a scene in which I was telling my stepsister about the dream I’d had the night before. Very meta, self-referential, or whatever you want to call it.
The seemingly lengthy end part of the dreams last night involved being somewhere to the north, like NH, ME or VT - the highway I drove down was a generic stretch of what looks like northern New England highway that seems to recycle in dreams where it’s needed - and there being a giant snow storm. I needed to get home, apparently for work, and was trying and trying to get through it, leaving when I shouldn’t have, getting in shoveling scenarios, trying to bash through a snowbank a few feet taller than the car, that sort of thing. Eventually I gave up and stayed in a motel, though even that was a matter of getting a room, then continuing to try to flee.
In the motel, which seemed to double as one of those side of the highway tourist rest stops and the offices of some business (for that matter, in part it looked like a miniature section of some airport terminal, in rustic), there was the challenge of getting something to eat. People were strangely open, but not open, at a lunch counter and small store. I found my way into the dining area, where someone had just been served a sandwich, but most people were just hanging out, and was told they would be serving starting at a specific time. An odd time, though I forget when. It was at the motel where I ran into my stepsister, as I recall.
Fast forward and I am driving down the highway in the morning, bright, sunny, and not a speck of snow, immediately south of where I had stayed. I was fuming at having had to spend the money and time to stay over. I was also alone, but then I wasn’t, because Deb and a kid, presumably Sadie as a baby, were with me. This would fit with the blizzard when we had to stay an extra night at the Park Plaza for Arisia, when Sadie was less than 4 months old. On the way, we discussed the state of the credit cards, and which one I’d used for the stay, and how it sucked to have needed to do that because we so couldn’t afford the $40.
Next thing I know, pressed for time, I was driving straight to work with family in tow, which is odd in that we’d gotten almost home when I got onto the highway going north from here. In reality, I’d have had to pass work on the way there, then changed my mind and not spent an extra 10 minutes dropping them home. Then there was a bit of fuss about where Deb and the kid would hang out at the office, which was a cross between my former large client, a larger business, and the motel I’d stayed at in the dream.
That was about it. I woke up, amused at the whole thing, and started coffee brewing. I certainly hope we don’t get any snow, and that dreaming about my stepsister has no prescient bad significance. However, this wasn’t like one of those “dreams that happen” dreams, or like when I flashed “this could be the last time I talk to her” out of the blue and sat to converse with my grandmother at length less than 36 hours before she died.
Being Friday and not having had it early enough to mail it, I have to make arrangements to drop money to the landlord. We may look like we’re sitting around watching soaps and playing with the kids, but each week we have to come up with $250 or $300 toward rent to defer eviction proceedings. The drop-ins by people who are bringing food donations and don’t care what the house looks like at any random time are welcome but are still disruptions. Visits that are just visits on a couple hours notice tend to get “well, this is really a bad day” pretty uniformly. Friday is especially bad with the actual rent delivery, but today I need to make a post office run - a small contribution to our finances a couple weeks hence because someone bought a book, I need to go to Wal-Mart and figure out how to stretch $30 beyond all recognition - including a couple bucks for yarn for a custom order to help our finances in a week or two, stop at my mother’s for a special crib mattress cover a cousin got us for Henry not to be allergic to the crib anymore (she’s allergic to everything herself, apparently), reply to the person who is offering temp work that’ll be great if the interview Monday doesn’t work out, figure out whether I need $8 or $16 for the train Monday and walking directions from South Station to my destination, help unbury and select clothes sealed in the leaky closet for the winter, continue my office organizing project, make banana bread, figure out what’s for supper and start it ahead of time if needed, and probably some things I’ve forgotten. Like e-mailing someone who might want me to do a computer cleanup Sunday, or Monday evening, and might have others who could use that, if she’s recovered enough from surgery. A few of those and it’s close to another rent week.
And I still haven’t worked on the giant “we’re back” fundraiser edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, but I should, because that could contribute to groceries or to the rent on the 11th. Or gas for the truck, because even if you take six weeks to use a tank, eventually you need more.
And with that, off I go, because the day is getting no younger.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Jay: Yes, No Bananas
We’ve ruled one food into the allergen or sensitivity camp for Henry: Bananas.
On one level, they are rare as an allergen. On another, they are related to latex allergies, which are very common and which he may also have to some degree, as I seem to.
We’re pleased with having suspected bananas enough to stop feeding them to him, in baby food form, after the very first time he ate them. The trouble was, it was non-obvious what things might be causing the skin issues, and that could, at the time, have been a red herring.
He seems to be able to eat safely rice, oatmeal, chicken, and apples. We’ll give him a couple days off and then try him with butternut, sweet potatoes, or carrots. That was the plan, until he saw the bananas and remembered them enough to go absolutely nuts begging for one. From a standpoint of answers, that worked out.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Jay: Today
My grandmother would have been 97, had she not done the actuarially correct thing for social security and died just after turning 65, as so many once did when social security and 65 as a retirement age were conceived. That used to be ancient. Now it’s still relatively prime for many, who will increasingly go on to collect for 20, 30 years and beyond, expecting that not merely to be supplemental, but to be primary and in some kind of style. Meanwhile, if you take the logic behind it to be the children supporting parents in retirement - since remember, what you pay in goes to support current retirees, not into a fund, not into an investment vehicle that garners market-based returns - then it all falls apart when you have retirees and their children both over retirement age, collecting from the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original generation. Historically, there will have been almost a century of fiscal pig-in-snake, with an explosion coming on the far end. None of which means I don’t appreciate having my grandmother and parents around, but the whole thing is alarming on the larger scale.
I had a crazy dream in which Fred Thompson had died. He had been dating some obscure cousin of ours, a fictitious person for the sake of the dream, and she was annoyed that being merely his girlfriend, she would get no inheritance. Apparently, my grandmother had died as well, so the obscure cousin instead maneuvered to take control of my grandmother’s estate instead, trying to steal it out from under the proper heirs. This created quite the sense of alarm.
Also in the same dream sequence I had returned to college for some classes. The parts I recall are my worry that I wouldn’t be able to handle how different it was using computers for accounting classes, and riding a bicycle to get to school. I was with a bunch of other students and a professor, all on bikes, riding down route 106 in an area of Halifax I can’t specify. As we rode along, the professor or whoever it was lectured on political matters and sent away anyone who disagreed. It was far worse than anything that was happening back when I was in college.
Anyway, I guess today I have to continue the close and office cleaning and organizing I started over the weekend, which will be useful in that it makes things more efficient. It’s distracting to go and discover things I forgot existed, pausing to be excited or amused in the process. That and all the time it takes to relocate or repack things. The closet space was not being used efficiently.
The problem was it’s where toys go away on vacation, and the kids are hard to keep out of the office, even with the door closed. It’s also where toys they haven’t been given yet live. Thus there are a couple of magnetized doodle pads, a couple bottles of bubble stuff, three little cars, a couple packs of modeling clay, some crayons, and whatever else.
We were thinking of putting a bookcase in there, against the window. Yes, there’s a window in the closet. It’s smaller than a true walk-in, but large as closets go. In fact, apart from the ceiling being stair-shaped in one of them, it’s about the dimensions of two closets in the cellar, where our bedrooms were in the house where I grew up. One was under the stairs, along a hallway front to back, and the other was back to back with it, opening into what was originally the master bedroom. In fact, as I recall, you could go through one closet and come out the other, hidden passage style, subject to the amount of stuff in the way. Trouble is, the bookcase would eliminate, it appears, the large shelving unit. But it would make way for hanging shelves and some other flexibility.
I also need to run to the store today. I’d say I was trying to figure out how to make $5 buy peanut butter, bear jelly, yeast, sugar, apples, some veggies, a few pounds or so of meat of some kind, some baby food, and whatever else I’m forgetting, but we’re expecting my nephew to stop by and give me $20 for a spare power supply. That puts it closer to reality.
I was probably going to say something else, but can’t remember, so off to the shower and on with the day…
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Jay: Mmm… Candy
I’m having a tough to be motivated today, if you don’t count being motivated to eat the jelly beans that are supposed to be for the kids.
Still working on cleaning the office. Need to start working on changing the chicken carcass into broth and meat and probably carrots and macaroni or something like that. Maybe not soup so much as a mixed group of food cooked in broth and seasoned together. If I do that for supper, then the small ham my mother brought us can be cooked another day.
I tried the salmon patties, which weren’t bad. Sadie ate a couple pieces but probably lacked room with the peeps. Valerie wasn’t interested, but ate two or three off my fork. Apparently having been dipped in tarter sauce and served from my fork rendered them okay. I don’t normally think of tarter sauce as a salmon thing, but it was good. It would probably have been good on bread, and the texture was like eating a burger.
I had the craziest sequence of dreams last night. In it, I kept seeing my brother driving, or parked and getting out of, our green van, which had one fender almost covered in duct tape. The scenario was that he had persuaded us to give it up, then he had turned around and gotten it from the place we sent it to, fixed it up enough for it to be usable, and enjoyed the cheap transportation. Not sure what exactly I was angsting about or projecting there, but it’s not something he’d have done. I also kept not being able to catch and confront him about it, and wasn’t clear it was him at first sighting.
The car he urged me to get rid of was the Sentra, for years, reaching a crescendo around the time the ill-fated van came available. Thus he can’t say he told us not to buy the van, but he’s didn’t tall us we should, either. He gave a clear idea of the risk and condition and from there it was all my doing. For some reason he thinks he has to make sure the world knows it’s not his fault I bought it. However, the purchase, of that vehicle at that time, was a direct result of his harping on the Sentra.
But he had nothing to do with our deciding to get rid of the van. Very strange.
It may have been inspired by the rumor that a relative is thinking about giving us a car that is about to be retired and replaced, as something we could muddle along with briefly and apparently carry everyone in. Since it’s someone who has no special reason whatsoever to think of doing that, and an utter surprise, I was astonished.
Anyway, back to getting things done.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Jay: Randomness and Resume Repost
I think I’m going to spend part of the day cleaning the office before I get back into job hunting. Well, that and I need to run to the store for milk and peanut butter at some point. And I may toss a chicken in the oven from the freezer, with low heat to thaw and cook it slowly and warm the house, though the next two days are supposed to be colder. I seem to be having a problem with having lost warming fat with all that weight, because in what should not be uncomfortable conditions, I am bundled up and still cold. If I don’t do the chicken, I might get yeast and try bread without milk. The recipe I’d been using calls for milk, but that’s not universal. We’re putting back the wheat for Deb before we put back the milk.
Anyway, the point of this random post, going up here because I don’t have any birthdays to be filler, is to post my resume again, partly in case there is any traffic from Mediacasters.tv. I’ll maybe also link the resume near the top of the sidebar.
This is what I’d call a general technical and managerial resume. I need to create one (well, a new and improved one) oriented toward online content, editing, writing, etc., for those prospective options, which really don’t overlap much with the ones where mentioning blogging new media can be detrimental, or at least not helpful.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Jay: Obligatory Post
Actually, I didn’t have a birthday until I saw one mentioned elsewhere, so I’d planned this to be something for a “no birthdays” morning post.
I was sad but not surprised Amanda Overmeyer was executed last night. Kristy Lee Cook is one lucky country-twanged long-legged hot blond in a short dress. I might prefer to see Amanda to her if I were attending one of the concerts, but I won’t be, it’s not that strong a preference, and this means, as I noted, Kristy needs the performance of her life next week. Though a couple others flopping sufficiently might be enough, if she’s adequate and being cute.
I was shocked that Carly was in the bottom three. She was too good for that, so there has to be some combination of the controversy sucking away votes, people thinking she’s safe, her support not being as strong as I might have thought, or David Archuletta’s lopsided vote totals sucking the oxygen out of the room and making funny things happen with the rest of the totals. Face it, unless there’s enough controversy, backlash, or something, Achoo is the winner and this is a race for second through fourth now.
Today I have to call the nice lady at the hospital whose sole job is to line people up with insurance if they lack it. Because this Republican Socialism thing, it won’t add bureaucracy at all. Probably about the time we’re squared away with free insurance for the poor, I’ll land a job that includes it.
I’ve been meaning to do a giant fundraising edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. It might be worth a few hours of that to fetch a little grocery money or even an additional week of rent and make me think people actually appreciated my efforts all these years. Which I know they did, and not just the few who have expressed an interest in still seeing it or helping. I’ve been told I should emphasize it and look for business development work, or something like that. That may be gotten to soon, before it becomes moot. I’ve been accumulating links for it.
And yeah, fundraiser notwithstanding, you are always welcome to use the PayPal tipjar button, now more than ever. Or use the address for Deb’s, which is actually better, deb at neatlytangled dot com.
It’s so cute. Valerie has taken to putting a mitten on a foot, like a very heavy sock. She just had me put a shoe on the other foot. She loves to change clothes and play dress-up.
Speaking of money, there’s nothing like going to the store with $16 available, needing diapers and groceries, and being focused on eliminating certain things from the diet.
Although we think we have a good idea what is going on with Henry, and what the allergic reaction was about. That and the idea that food proteins consumed by the mother survice intact in breast milk appears to be bogus, if you research it sufficiently.
Still, the discovery that corn, usually corn syrup, is in almost everything was rather startling and something we’d like to start avoiding. It’s also shocking that companies would put known likely allergens in some of the earliest foods one would feed a baby, thinks you buy because they are safe. I’m also wondering about my own levels of food sensitivities, which are not the same as allergies, for which I once tested negative.
I am not only down 29 lbs from my high plateau and 39 lbs from my absolute high (and annoyed it hasn’t budged further for a few days), but also thinner than the current weight would imply. I went from 42 required to falling off to 40 fitting comfortably to 40 wanting to fall off. Which means some of the tighter pants in that size I have somewhere should fit.
This was supposed to be quick.
The job hunting proceeds apace, subject to excitement and interruption and confusion and mild sickness and such. I have to make a list and follow it today. I’ve been doing a lot of networking-related activity.
Okay, I can’t remember anything else I might have intended to say. I need to get to the actual stuff to be done, starting with an announcement about CotC and link to the resume over at Bizosphere.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Jay: Big Cuba Begets Big Sugar Begets Big Corn
Since we unofficially had added corn to the list of possible allergy suspects and Deb was initially supposed to be avoiding the allergen possibilities, that led to some label reading and the dismay at almost everything being made of corn syrup. As I said, ADM must be proud.
What doesn’t have corn mostly has wheat. The baby’s oatmeal that’s an introductory food that’s supposed to be utterly pure and safe contains wheat. It didn’t used to, which was partly why that was our preferred brand, but apparently that came with the fancy new packaging.
What I pointed out to Deb, in our discussion of Big Corn, and their having the ethanol farce now so they could dispense with the corn syrup nonsense, is that the corn syrup thing is partly a reaction to Big Sugar. Most people don’t realize the extent of sugar protectionism in this country.
In turn, what’s a huge sugar producer? Cuba. Who are some of the domestic sugar producers? Cuban ex-pats. How did all the Castro administrations and associated congresses respond to Cuba being a gulag and to the vote buying of the Cuban-Americans? By fruitlessly restraining trade, topping it off with extra protection for domestic sugar.
Why shouldn’t Big Corn step in and profit from it?
Idiocy.
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