Category Archives: humor

Meijer Is My Frenemy

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I love Meijer. I hate Meijer. Call me conflicted. I’m so conflicted, in fact, I’ll probably give my brain whiplash.

On the one hand, Meijer is great. I particularly like this terrific thing called Flash Food. (I imagine other stores have it, too, but I learned about it through Meijer.) It’s grocery shopping for useless people. There’s an app that lets me survey the food that’s near, but not past, its expiration date. (There are always lots of baked goods available, so I have muffins for breakfast nearly every morning.) I think last year I saved nearly $1000 in food costs, plus the food didn’t go to waste.

(I used to work for a company that occasionally gave cocktail parties at business conventions, and there were always assorted hors d’oeuvres. They were never all eaten, and I worried some about the food waste. I learned, however, that if you signed a release form, the leftovers would be donated to a local shelter. I always liked to think of the homeless people being treated to mini-quiches and tiny beef Wellington amuse-bouches. But I digress.)

Meijer is also located within a mile and a half of our house, which is super-convenient, especially since my husband works there and doesn’t have a long commute. (His is still longer than mine, which consists of commuting from the bedroom upstairs to my study downstairs. It’s a quick trek, and I’ve never needed snow tires. But I digress again.)

I also love that Meijer gives him a regular paycheck, which is necessary to maintain our essential supply of cat food. It’s also handy that he works there, since he can do all the shopping and pick up the Flash Food and I don’t have to ha ha ha ha ha!

On the other hand, Meijer pisses me off. First, I object on principle to stores where you can buy both milk and lawn furniture. It’s simply wrong. The store is too large as well, and they keep rearranging it. I’m afraid that I’ll wander for hours through the freezer section and die of exposure. When Dan and I shop together, we need to use our cell phones to keep track of each other. “I’m in the pet section. Where are you?” “Cheap meat.”

(I do like the cheap meat section. Once when we were shopping, I ran into a mutual friend. I towed him over to where Dan was mulling over the varieties of pudding available. “Look what I found in cheap meat!” I said. But I digress yet again.)

I don’t love Dan’s schedule. He has Sundays and Mondays off, which is okay. He can join me on bank-and-post-office-type errands that have to be done on a weekday. But he has to be at work several days a week at 6:00 a.m. Until my sleep habits went wonky this winter, I couldn’t get up to have tea with Dan in the mornings. But wonky waking means that now I get up at the same (way too early) time Dan does, and I can have my muffins and tea while he eats his hard-boiled eggs and toaster waffles.

All in all, though, I can’t stay mad at Meijer. What we thought would be a short chapter in our lives has turned into a ten-year narrative. What might to some seem like a lowly job as a greeter has meant for Dan an ideal antidote to burnout and a position where he gets to smile and chat with people all day.

And what it means for me is whiplash. I’ll ask Dan to bring me home an icebag. And lemon muffins, while he’s at it.

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Bliss, Interrupted

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My husband and I booked a couples massage this week at Gravity Spa, which is called that because they also have floatation tanks. Those actually sounded good, but I no longer own a bathing suit and didn’t want to float in my underwear or sweats, so they weren’t an option for me. When it comes to dressing for the occasion, wearing a brand-new pair of underpants is about the limit of my ability to plan, and that was all that I really needed for a massage.

Both of us have had massages before, so the process wasn’t new to us. (During one of my previous massages, my left foot went into spasm while the masseuse was working on it. She apologized profusely, but there was really no need. I have some nerve damage in my toes due to a back operation. If that sounds odd, well, it did to me too, but there you have it. I’m just lucky that nothing in between was affected. But I digress.)

We showed up at the spa all ready for our sensuous experience and were conducted into the massage room, which (of course) featured low lighting, soothing decor, and gentle music. It was all a little genteel for me. I prefer my physical pummeling rough and tough. If it doesn’t cause me to moan, whimper, and make sounds that could be mistaken for erotic fulfillment, I’m not being sufficiently rubbed down. A.J., my masseur, obliged. (I had inquired about the various levels of pressure involved and was told that a standard massage was considered a Level One, a Swedish massage a Level Two, and a deep tissue massage a Level Three. That’s what I chose. There’s also something called a hot stone massage, but I didn’t like the sound of that. My skin is tender, even if my muscles aren’t. But I digress again.)

A.J. started in on me with a suitable amount of pressure and pleasantly scented oil. I tried to restrain my cries of pleasure for fear of making the other workers and clients of the spa think that there was something untoward going on.

Suddenly, the pressure diminished. A.J. said that he had to step out for a moment because his right arm was going numb. After a few minutes, Katie, Dan’s masseuse, stepped out to check on him. “I hope he’s not having a heart attack,” I said.

“No,” she said. “That would be his left arm. His right arm could indicate a stroke.” This did not reassure me in the slightest. I thought I had maimed my masseur for life – or perhaps even killed him.

Katie returned and said that A.J. would be unable to continue. We could both leave, I could go into the lobby and wait there for Dan’s massage to be done, or I could stay in the room while Dan’s massage was going on. The warming table and fluffy blanket made up my mind. I burrowed into them, wrapped myself up like a burrito, and stayed to watch. It was interesting. When Katie worked on Dan’s hips, she really braced herself and leaned into it. I guess she had to.

When the massages were over, we were informed that we wouldn’t have to pay for them because our experience was interrupted. (We were also advised that we might not want to leave the spa just then because it was pouring down rain and tornado warnings (or watches, whichever) were being talked about. We chose to leave and drive the mile and a half home. We thought it would be safer, despite the fact that our house was destroyed by a tornado three years ago. But I digress again.)

And that, dear friends, is how I arrived home, looking like a wet dog, with half my back smelling like coconut.

(The dog in the photo is just there for visual interest. No dogs were soaked or massaged in the writing of this post.)

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The Care and Feeding of a Writer

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So you’ve got a writer in the family – and, like many or even most writers, they act peculiar. They can bite your head off one day and be clingy the next, go for days without eating or sleeping, or zoom back and forth between elation and depression. What’s a family member to do? Is there anything you can do that won’t get your head bitten off?

I’m here to tell you that, although you’ll likely never change a writer’s behavior unless they give up writing, there are ways you can live successfully together. It won’t be happily all the time – I can’t guarantee that. Just think of your writer as you would a tropical fish. They need a certain amount of care and attention, food, and a filter, but they can be a focal point for a room. (If you keep the door closed, that is. Writers are notoriously cranky, and guests and young children maybe shouldn’t be exposed to that. And not having a filter is a problem (not just for writers, but for people in general). So perhaps they’re not like tropical fish at all, except for maybe a triggerfish or a lionfish. But I digress.)

Care and Attention

There are times when a writer doesn’t need attention – or even interaction. There is a stage of writing called “prewriting.” It looks an awful lot like lying on the couch, doing nothing. The creative brain is churning nonetheless and doesn’t take kindly to being interrupted. This is especially true if the writer doesn’t have a room of their own, which many don’t. The corner of a room is more likely to be the writer’s habitat. But a door that will open and close is a definite asset if you expect your writer to actually produce anything.

In fact, a writer will need a fair amount of alone time. When they’re actively writing (as opposed to prewriting), they won’t want to be interrupted – short of fire or death. Death (other than the death of the writer) may even be ignored and so will any fire not directly threatening the writer’s computer.

Feeding

When the writer is on a roll, they won’t want to stop to eat. At the most, they will pause for long enough to down a yogurt. If you realize they haven’t eaten in quite a while, you can offer a sandwich, but it’s best to poke it through the door with a stick, the way you would offer food to a large bear. (Personally, I’m lucky. I have a small refrigerator in my writing room, stocked with easy edibles like cheddar and American cheese, yogurt, applesauce, and things that are spreadable on crackers (cream cheese, apple butter, peanut butter). But I digress again.)

Rejection

This is a fact of life for writers, at least if they write for publication and not for the desk drawer or computer desktop folder. If they’re new at putting their work out there into the wild, this can cause distress, desolation, or just generally hopelessness. There is not much you can really do about this, except a generous application of “there, there,” which doesn’t actually help but sounds sympathetic. You can try reminding them of famous writers like J.K. Rowling whose works were rejected multiple times before they were published. This will either rev your writer up with dreams of becoming a multimillionaire (which are, let’s face it, bound to be dashed) or make them feel worse because of the likelihood of having to endure the many, many rejections.

Unless you yourself are a professional editor (which you probably aren’t, or shouldn’t have married a writer if you are), don’t offer suggestions unless asked for them. Even then, you should probably bow out more or less gracefully – “I don’t know. You’re the writer. I could never presume to give you advice.” Most writers won’t even listen to suggestions from their writers’ group or editor, should they be so lucky as to find one.

You and Your Writer

Maybe you married or live with a writer knowing what you were getting into. Maybe it came as a surprise later, when they announced a desire to express themselves in writing. Whatever your situation, rest assured that living with a writer is possible. You just have to have unfailing patience and supportiveness – and a job to bring in income if they’re a “full-time writer.”

Does it seem like you have to sacrifice a lot (and then listen to the writer in your life complain about the sacrifices they make for their art)? I won’t deny it. Just ask my husband. He lives with a writer. And I appreciate it – every time he pokes a sandwich through the door and then I close it, or when I zone out while we’re watching TV and can’t catch him up on the plot if he leaves the room for a moment. I live a writer’s life – and I couldn’t do it without my husband. I try to remember that. He puts up with a lot in the process of caring for and feeding me.

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Monthly, Forever

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It’s not that I’m a stranger to subscriptions. I started getting magazine subscriptions when I was a teen and began receiving them for Christmas presents when our family finances were impacted by my father’s illness. I chose astronomy and science fiction magazines. My parents didn’t subscribe to magazines much, except for Reader’s Digest and their condensed books.

I also dabbled in record subscriptions, back in the day when they sent actual vinyl records that had every chance of arriving with scratches and warps. (I don’t know if music subscriptions went to tapes, 8-tracks, CDs, or downloads after that. I do have a couple of subscriptions on Patreon and at least one of them supplies me with music every month, but otherwise, I get all my music via the internet. Not that I download much. I already have nearly 670 albums stored on my music app (formerly called iTunes). But I digress.)

Later on, once I was married, I found a pet store in town that offered a “Fish of the Month” club. (For some unknown reason, we referred to it as “Fish ala Month,” although they weren’t, of course, edible. Another digression.) Dan had a fish tank at the time and enjoyed going to the store every month to see what new species of fish was on offer that month. I kept up the subscription until the pet store went out of business. This was back in the days when there were still locally owned pet shops.

Since that time, the idea of subscriptions has blossomed. You can now get blossoms that arrive every month and can be given as gifts. Not just flowers, either. I once gave my therapist a small succulent as a gift and have ever after been pursued to upgrade to a succulent subscription.

Nor are plants the only subscriptions on offer. You can get quarterly subscriptions to goods from Ireland, including food, snacks, and jewelry. You can subscribe to puzzles, either jigsaws or more elaborate ones that require solving a mystery. Other “surprise” subscriptions where you don’t know what you’re getting are for children’s toys (or dog toys), foods from different regions of the country, rare coffees, discount wines, Asian snacks, cocktail mixers (and liquor, if you choose that option), cheese of the month or charcuterie kits (including vegan and gluten-free), cookie dough, pasta, spices or hot sauces, candy, tea, beauty items or perfumes, detox products, vacation souvenirs, earrings or necklaces, socks-of-the-month, replicas of historical documents, dried flower arrangements, candles, and pet foods and supplies.

Some of the subscriptions available leave me befuddled. One is underwear. I buy new bras and panties when my old ones are no longer serviceable. But I don’t subscribe. I go to Jockey, Fruit of the Loom, or another source and order what I need. I can’t imagine avidly anticipating the arrival of three new panties or bra-and-panties sets every month. (Besides, I never wear matching bras and panties. Every victim of a serial killer you see on TV shows is wearing matching lacy undergarments. I figure I’m a lot safer if I were a purple-polka-dot bra and simple green panties. But I digress some more.)

Other subscriptions I don’t understand are oysters-of-the-month (ick!) and monthly sex toys and books (although if they’re delivered in plain brown wrappers, they will spare you embarrassment and make a visit to the local sex shop unnecessary).

The really strange subscription I came across during my research for this post was playable musical postcards, something previously unimaginable to me. Evidently, the postcards from different lands are made of vinyl and can be played on a turntable. (There is an option to receive only a postcard and an online download of a song if you don’t possess a turntable.) The tunes are from indie artists, so you don’t need to worry about getting Mariah Carey in your December mail.

Will I get another subscription to something-or-other? I think not. I already have subscriptions to TV streaming channels. I have Patreon subscriptions to support my friends’ art. I have subscriptions to Archaeology and Smithsonian magazines (offline versions) for my husband. I subscribe to the New York Times crossword puzzles. I probably have a few other subscriptions that I’ve forgotten about and ought to cancel.

But I am tempted by the solve-a-mystery and cheese-of-the-month subscription, though only if I can specify cheeses that don’t advertise the fact that they’re made of mold. I figure that anything the postal workers can smell is a bad idea, even if it’s only once a month.

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Dan’s Upgrade

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My husband has at last entered the 21st century! After literally decades of resistance, he has moved up from the flip-phone to the smartphone.

Of course, when we first got cell phones, all of them were flip-phones. And we thought we might be the last people on earth to get even those. A few misunderstandings that led to shouting and accusations of discourtesy meant that we needed to enter the digital age. After one particularly loud and angry … discussion, we decided to take the plunge. Dan in particular was reluctant to get a mobile device, since he didn’t want to be “tied to his phone” and perpetually available. But he had to admit that cell phones had their uses.

His compromise with his own Luddite leanings was never to figure out how to use the thing. While he eventually figured out how to record a voicemail message and even to leave a message on my phone, he never learned how to retrieve voicemail left for him. Instead, he let it pile up until the phone always reported that his voicemail was full, making it useless. (I recently deleted his voicemail and the messages there were all from January of a year ago, and most of them were from his mother. But I digress.)

Once smartphones became available, I opted for one when my flip-phone crapped out. Dan kept replacing his with another flip-phone when it was out of order or he lost it so thoroughly that it was likely in a different state, or maybe another country. I thought it might be because he wanted a phone that was most like a Star Trek communicator.

But when I got a smartphone (not that I was among the first to do so either), he looked askance at it. “I don’t want a phone that’s smarter than I am,” he said, which I suppose was meant as a joke, though I really couldn’t tell. I tried to convince him that the added features – the easy availability of news and weather and GPS, for example – made it worthwhile, but still he resisted. He said he didn’t want to be one of “those people” who had their eyes perpetually glued to a screen. (He once asked me what people did before they could stare at their cellphones. “Read books,” I said. “Not while they’re walking,” he replied. I had to tell him that when I was in high school I did indeed read books while walking from one class to the next. But I digress again.)

Then I started getting apps on my phone that I knew Dan or I would want or need. The prize among them was PictureThis, an app that let you take pictures of plants, then would identify them and provide other useful and interesting information about them, such as whether your plant looked sick or whether that species had been mentioned in a poem. It even provided the poem for you. This led to Dan dashing into the house, shouting, “Give me your phone,” and bringing it back with dirty smudges on it. When Dan got a tablet, I downloaded this app for him so he wouldn’t have to borrow my phone. I also downloaded some music and video apps onto the tablet when he was going to be visiting his mother. He hates her taste in TV.

Dan’s entry into the modern era was a consequence of a different app, though. Where he works, people clocked in and out using their smartphones. Dan couldn’t, and that meant he had to walk farther to do so. In a sense, it was laziness that turned the tide.

Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. The way his coworkers scanned in was using a QR code. Dan didn’t know what those were. So I had to download him a QR reader and show him how to use it. I don’t think he’s actually used it yet, but at least now he has the option when he’s too tired to make the long trudge.

I know he still mourns the death of his flip-phone, but even he had to admit that our phone provider didn’t really support them anymore. And the first night he had the smartphone I caught him with his nose pointed at the screen, watching YouTube videos.

He doesn’t love it yet, but I figure it’s just a matter of time. He’s no longer comparing its intelligence to his.

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Unpuzzling Words

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I’ve always said that, if there is a crossword gene, I inherited it from my maternal grandmother. Of course, it skipped a generation. My mother had no interest in crosswords. (I also inherited from my grandma a love of mystery novels. Not the red hair, though. That I had to acquire later. But I digress, already.) Here’s a look at some of my favorite puzzles and some of my favorite “puzzle-hacks.”

Yes, I was one of those obnoxious people who worked the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. Now that the puzzle is online, that’s moot. But I haven’t been doing it lately, despite the fact that I pay for a subscription. NYT has other puzzles that I find more intriguing.

One of them is not Wordle. I never gave in to this trend, but I wrote about it (https://butidigress.blog/2022/02/06/what-the-cool-kids-do/). I have no objection to Wordle, really. I can just scroll past all the posts people put up about their daily scores. And once I helped a friend determine the target word (“prism”). I just don’t need a daily addiction.

No, what I really like are the acrostics, though they’re only featured every other week. Acrostics, for those not in the know, involve solving clues like crosswords do, but not crossing the answers. The letters transpose into a quotation and author’s name. (This is way better on the computer than it was when I did them on paper.) When I look at the quotation with some letters filled in, I can often guess a few words. The word “people” is in a lot of them, and the pattern of “it is” and “I think” (and other “th” words) are pretty easy to recognize. Those letters then bounce into the clue answers. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can solve one in about 20 minutes, which is a nice break from work.

Anagrams can be fun, too. These are easier to solve if you have a set of Scrabble tiles on hand so you can rearrange them. Working with paper and pencil is much more difficult, though it can be done. I never have Scrabble tiles because my husband refuses to play with me, so I work on paper. I start by alphabetizing the letters so I can see better what I have to work with.

I like cryptograms, too. They are simple substitution codes, usually a quotation or a group of words under a heading. Here, the way to start is to look for which letter is used most often. It’s probably “e.” In a phrase or quote, there’s usually “the” more than once, which is a pattern that gives you two more letters. If there’s a heading or topic, you can guess words and look for word patterns that might fit them.

Cryptic crosswords are British-style puzzles, which means that they don’t cross the same way that American ones do. Instead, they cross at only two or three letters per word. And the clues are – well, cryptic. They contain anagrams, but also words within words, backward words, and other sly tricks. “Capital of Egypt” might only mean the letter “E,” for example. My friend Leslie and I used to work them together, so we could fill in the blanks for each other, but occasionally we would have to leave a word unsolved. Sometimes, we still didn’t understand it even when we looked at the answers.

Back when I worked in an office, I used to take “puzzle breaks,” on the theory that I didn’t take smoke breaks, and I could take them without having to go outside. Unfortunately, my bosses didn’t see it that way. I can’t say that’s why I left that job, but I can say that now that I work for myself at home I can take breaks for whatever I want, whenever I want hahahahaha!

Life is good. Puzzles are good. Even work is good!

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Puzzling Numbers

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Words are my life. Numbers, not so much.

I’ve never been a math-phobe. All throughout school, I combined reading and writing with the proverbial ‘rithmetic. Set theory, quadratic equations, whatever – no problem. Then I hit what my high school called “enriched” geometry. It was the first D I had ever gotten in my school career. It soured me on math.

I didn’t feel I deserved it, either. What was “enriched” about the geometry was the fact that it required three-column proofs instead of two-column proofs. (It was later that I learned about 151 proofs.)

Three-column proofs, as I recall, required you to state which theorem or corollary you were using to solve the problem. I had a philosophical disagreement with this system. I contended that if you ever needed to know whether it was corollary C or theorem 17, you could look up the name of it. It was knowing how to use it that was important. So I never put in the third column and I got a D.

(I think this actually helped me when I went to college. At the Ivy League institution I attended, there were many students who had never received a grade lower than an A. When they suddenly had to compete at a higher level and got a C or even a B, they were devastated. But I digress.)

Later in life, I found that I did indeed understand geometry when a manager at my job was hanging pictures. “I can hang these four pictures in a square, but the hard one will be hanging the one in the center,” he said. I took two pieces of string and ran one from the nail in the lower left to the one in the upper right, and the other from the lower right to the upper left. I put the fifth nail where the two strings crossed. So much for theorems and corollaries.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about this week. That’s right, that entire section was a big digression. What I meant to talk about was puzzles.

Word puzzles are probably better known (and I’ll be writing about them next week), but there are number and math puzzles as well.

Sudoku (which means “single number” in Japanese) hit the big time in the US in 2004. It made an appearance in puzzle books earlier, in 1979, when it was called “Number Place.” But it really took off when a computer program was developed that created the puzzles.

(On first learning of Sudoku puzzles, and hearing that they were supposed to stave off senility, my husband decided to give them a try, though he had no interest in crossword puzzles. He was heard to say, “I may not be able to spell, but damn it, I can count to nine!” But I digress. Again.)

But plain sudoku didn’t satisfy me. Being something of a masochist, I soon found myself wanting something more. What I found was jigsaw sudoku. Instead of living in nice, neat square boxes, the numbers were scattered throughout shapes that looked like gerrymandered congressional districts. The rest of the rules were the same. Each shape had to be filled in with the numbers 1–9, with no duplicates in any box or row.

I stopped solving sudoku when I stopped buying the little books in the grocery store or pharmacy. Recently, though, I found a site online that offers a daily jigsaw sudoku. I had to try it. I selected the medium difficulty setting.

On my first try, I scored -520. I figure that was the equivalent of getting a D. Maybe I should go back to the NYT crossword, where at least they don’t give you a grade.

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What Does Friday Even Mean?

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Today is Sunday, but in a way, it’s still Friday. The whole month has been nothing but Fridays, in fact.

We used to have Black Friday. It was the day after Thanksgiving, when the turkey-bloated got their exercise by standing in checkout lines in stores, trying to get a jump on their Christmas shopping. To lure in the many still suffering from postprandial torpor, many stores began offering special sales and deals on that day.

(Okay, I’m showing off. “Postprandial torpor” is the technical name for “food coma.” But I digress.)

Tech geeks got their shop on on Cyber Monday, when computers and other paraphernalia were offered at Low, Low, Bargain Prices!

Those were the days when Friday and Monday actually meant something.

Now, we have Black Friday for the whole month of November. And I don’t mean just four Fridays, either. Thirty days of Friday. And the Cyber Monday people have given up on Mondays altogether. They’ve succumbed to Black Friday fever as well; they just toss in the towel and lower their prices all month long.

Of course, I have a tendency to ignore sales. I know that there are people who haunt the sales. They refuse to buy anything that isn’t at least 10% off. I’m more inclined to whimsical shopping, buying things whenever whimsy strikes me. Fortunately, that means anything I buy in November has a good chance of being on sale anyway.

Maybe subconsciously I’m observing Black November (that doesn’t sound right), because I’ve already done all my Christmas shopping. In fact, everything I’ve ordered has already been delivered and is sheltering in place in my study closet, safe from marauding cats and an inquisitive husband.

Every day is Cyber Monday to me, since I do all my shopping online. For that matter, I do my banking and bill-paying online, too. I feel like a supervillain, coordinating all my plans from my keyboard. Of course, I can’t wrap presents online (and I refuse to pay extra to have my purchases wrapped by the assorted vendor-elves). So, I really hope my husband finds ripping open Tyvek bags to be suitably festive.

(I do have one tiny gift bag decorated with butterflies that was included with a pair of earrings I ordered for myself. I suppose I could put the SD card I bought for hubby’s camera in it, although butterflies aren’t really Christmas-y in this part of the world. The camera itself will be in a plain brown box. But I digress again.)

It’s pointless for me to complain, though. After all, the Fourth of July only occurs on the Fourth anymore when it falls on a Saturday. Hardly any holidays stay put. Thanksgiving is reserved for Thursdays, but it can be anything from the 22nd to the 28th. Easter bobs and weaves, refusing to settle on a single date. You know it’s a Sunday, but you have to be a mathematician or a priest to figure out which one. (Or look it up online like I do.)

Christmas is always December 25th, but it can fall on any day of the week. So the day after Christmas doesn’t get a spiffy name like “Exchange Your Presents Tuesday” or “Discount Candy Cane Wednesday.”

The next thing we need to do is make sure that “Giving Tuesday” isn’t relegated to a single day when all the selling gets whole weeks and months. Maybe some useless – I mean, generous – billionaire could match donations to charitable organizations. I can think of a few who could use a little good karma. So, if there are any billionaires reading this, step right up! Giving November can use you – I mean, will appreciate your philanthropy!

Things I Want to See in My Lifetime

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World peace? An honest politician? A flying car? A second season of Firefly? Being able to retire? A printer that works?

Those are all worthy – though extremely unlikely – goals. But I want something else.

The first “thing I want to see in my lifetime” was to have a published book. Now I’ve done that. Twice. Check, check.

Another “bucket list” item was to see the Amber Room in St. Petersburg. The Amber Room is a recreation of a room in the Catherine Palace lined and decorated entirely with amber, weighing over six tons. The original Amber Room was constructed in the 18th century; later, it was disassembled and disappeared during World War II. It’s now considered lost forever, though there are always theories about how the pieces are on a sunken ship somewhere or in boxes stacked in an abandoned Nazi bunker.

Now that’s pretty much out of the question, what with U.S. relations with Russia, combined with my lack of funds for taking such an elaborate vacation. I’ll just have to be satisfied with my collection of amber jewelry and trinkets.

(Amber is prehistoric, fossilized tree resin. There are sometimes flies, mosquitos, or other bugs trapped in it, which makes the amber worth considerably more. The best-known varieties are clear golden in color, with shades from pale honey to nearly brown. There are also green amber and cherry amber, but I don’t care much for them. But I digress.)

No, what I really want to see in my own lifetime is a quotation from me on a t-shirt or a coffee mug. I know that I can order them one-off printed with anything I like (and I’ve had my book covers made into t-shirts and earrings), but what I want is to have someone else produce and wear them. I want to be in an airport and see someone wearing that shirt. I want to walk into an office and see someone drinking out of that mug.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any sayings worth saying. Perhaps my most well-known one is “If my aunt had wheels, she’d be a tea cart.” That could, I suppose, appear on a t-shirt with a nice weird graphic of an aunt with a tea cart. My other signature saying is, “Sad, but true. True, but sad.” That’s short enough to fit on a mug, but a little nonspecific for anyone to take as their preferred slogan.

Of course, there’s also “DBF&P,” which stands for “Drop Back Five and Punt.” This is a phrase my husband and I use often because we’ve had to do it so often in our lives. Maybe the t-shirt would read “DPF&P*” with the translation as a footnote. I have plenty of obscure t-shirts and mugs (and shot glasses). Maybe someone else collects them too.

Most of the quotes from my blogs are too long for a mug, or even for a t-shirt. For example, “Teachers are the artists and architects of the future. We owe them a little more slack and a lot more support.” Readability would be a problem. It seems out of the question for me to be both meaningful and pithy.

Another thing I would like to see is one of my Facebook posts going viral. So far, I’ve had no luck there, either. I pass along plenty of other people’s posts, but almost no one passes along mine. Of course, that’s likely because most of the things I post are personal – interesting (at least to me) things that are happening in my life and funny things my husband or cats do. Apparently, our little family is insufficiently amusing.

The other day, I did download a meme generator (called, cleverly, Meme Generator) in hopes of putting a novel caption on an existing photo. The thing is, I didn’t want to use the too-familiar ones like “Disloyal Boyfriend” or “Change My Mind,” and again I have the problem of thinking up a clever caption short enough to fit. So here’s what I came up with as a trial run. This is my husband in a bar in Ireland. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to post it yet.

You can help make one of my dreams come true. Vote on whether I should post this meme (keeping in mind my husband doesn’t have Facebook) or not.

In the Kitchen 2.0

cooking, etc., food, funny things, humor, , , , , , ,

I watch way too much Food Network. I’ve only ever tried to make two recipes I learned there and one was really only a theory, not an actual recipe. The actual recipe I tried was Ina Garten’s Triple Ginger Cookies. (I learned that when Ina says “jumbo eggs,” she means jumbo eggs.) The theory was Bobby Flay’s Tangerine Turkey, which I adapted to use orange juice instead of tangerine.

(Bobby Flay is so predictable. No matter what he cooks, he always includes one or more of his favorite ingredients. In addition to the tangerine juice, he invariably includes Calabrian chiles, pomegranate molasses, and either bourbon or tequila. Sometimes even when he’s making dessert. I don’t know why they even bother to have a blind tasting on Beat Bobby Flay. But I digress.)

But, even as Flay never changes, lots of changes do occur in the cooking world – all manner of trends come and go. For a while in the 70s, everyone who got married received a fondue pot. Later, the trend was blackened everything, which meant either burnt or way too spicy. Now we have pumpkin spice everything. Though with nearly everyone hating on it, it may not last for much longer.

But there are other trends in food and cooking, and the times, they are a’changing. What do we have now?

I’m glad you asked. We have bacon on everything. Avocado toast. Salted caramel. Poached eggs. Cauliflower. And, apparently, buttered saltines.

Bacon is such a trend that it appears everywhere. Strawberry-bacon crepes. Garnish for a Bloody Mary. I can’t say whether this is a recent trend. It feels like it’s gone on forever. Today I heard that men’s second favorite thing, apart from sex, was not beer but bacon. (I just had a brilliant idea for a new flavor of edible panties. But I digress some more.)

Avocado toast has a rep for being the chosen chow of hipsters. Although I have no objection to it (I love avocados and have eaten many a slice of toast), I’m not sure what’s so exciting about guacamole on bread. Though you do eat guacamole with chips, and that’s another grain product.

Salted caramel is something I heartily approve of, and I hope it stays in vogue for many, many years. I wouldn’t have thought just from hearing the name that it would be good, but I love caramel and was willing to try a new version of it. Now I’m hooked. Makes me wonder what other candies would be improved by salt. Chocolate? Butterscotch? Peppermints? No, probably not, though someone is bound to try it sooner or later.

Poached eggs are appearing everywhere, especially on sandwiches. The idea is to rupture the egg when you chomp into the sandwich so the yolk becomes some kind of marvelous sauce. The chefs describe it as “unctuous,” which I have always associated with “oleaginous,” loosely translated as “smarmy,” something I don’t want my sandwiches to be. I once ate a burger with a poached egg and it unctuoused all over my sweater. I was not a happy chomper.

Cauliflower came around with the advent of the gluten-free movement. As I understand it, gluten-free food is really beneficial only if you have celiac disease, but that doesn’t stop every Tom, Dick, and Harriet from swearing by it. And everyone who likes gluten in their mac-n-cheese, pizza crust, and rice pilaf swearing at it.

As for buttered saltines, I just learned this week that this was a thing. Personally, I don’t think it sounds very exciting, not the way bread and butter is.

Celebrity chefs are responsible for a lot of other kitchen trends, not necessarily associated with food. Take clogs, for example (specifically Crocs). I recently read a whole article on this – I think it was in the LA Times. Apparently, Crocs are valued for their non-slip soles and their ease of cleaning up after spaghetti sauce spills on them. But I’ve noticed that celebrity TV chefs are now wearing fancy sneakers – brightly colored or sequined ones. I don’t know how well they stand up under bolognese, but I guess if you’re a celebrity chef, you can always buy new ones.

Even kitchen equipment has changed. It used to be that no self-respecting chef would go anywhere without their squeeze bottles, the kind that used to hold ketchup and mustard in diners. They were used to decorate plates (and food) with dots, spirals, and squiggles of whatever sauce was on the menu. (Old joke: “Do you have everything on the menu?” “Yes, what would you like?” “A clean menu.”)

Nowadays, chefs have paintbrushes to put a swoosh of sauce on the plate for the food to rest on. If they can’t afford paintbrushes, they make a swoop with the back of a spoon. Which is all well and wonderful, but you can’t write Happy Birthday in chocolate on a plate if you’re using a spoon or a paintbrush. (Unless it’s a wee tiny one.)

When I was in college, there was a class called Food Facts and Fads. I never took it, so I don’t really know, but I think the fads they were talking about were extreme diets. Personally, I say to heck with the fad diets! Bring on the salted caramels!

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