The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Critters

A while back I inherited 5 lovely stone slabs from a neighbor who was moving away.  Here is one of them:

  When I dragged one across the back yard , I noticed something had dug a hole under the gravel, chewed through the plastic barrier and burrowed right underneath our shed. 

So I stuff a plastic trash bag with some metal jar lids and other recyclables, and push that into the hole and then covered it with an unopened trash bag, shoveled gravel back over the top, and we shall see where they dig next.

The neighbors think it is the work of ground squirrels, although I've never seen any about.  What do you think?

Crash, Crunch, Ouch!

The "ouch" is from watching dollar bills fly out of one's pocket after the crash and the crunch. 

We have only had to have auto body work done 3 times in the last 35 years or so, but as in all that time we never damaged anyone else's property, it was annoying each time someone damaged ours.

Each time the vehicle was parked while one of us was at work, running errands downtown, or in one instance just opening the front door after having gotten off from work.   I guess we should be glad we weren't involved in moving accidents, but the problem with having your car crashed into while it is parked is that usually the culprits get away, leaving us stuck with the deductible. 

What adds insult to injury is having to chase around town trying to find a repair shop.  Those folks are busy!  Other people must have more accidents than us.  There is usually a long wait even to meet with someone to discuss the repairs. 

But now there are some Collision Repair Experts who can be booked online:

auto body shop irvine

What else is really kewl is they post a customer satisfaction index and reviews on the home page for every shop in their network. 

Corn Fed

I grew up in corn country and even worked for the DeKalb Agricultural Association, long before they were purchase by Monsanto.  The best perk of that job was that employees got to buy as many cartons of eggs as they could use at the then discounted price of 25 cents a dozen.   When I took an undergraduate biology class at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, the whole semester was devoted to corn genetics.  Ackkk!  I wanted to disect a frog!

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the DeKalb Alumni Association is not a group of NIU grads, but rather of former employees of "the AG" and if you never drove through the midwest and noticed the little flying ears of corn logos posted along just about every country road, here's a reproduction:

Alumni Association

I missed the History Channel's recent feature on corn, but Discover has a great page on this versatile vegetable in their How Stuff Works series:

I'm Retired but Corn Isn't!

I love that photo.  Speaking of great photos, this page on hydroponically grown corn has some too:

Hydroponic Corn Gets Seven Feet High

 

All About Online TV

I don't watch much TV and when I do it is usually filtered by TIVO or some other service that lets me be very picky about what I spend time seeing.  True, I miss one or two cute commercials that way from time to time, but guess what?  All of the really adorable commercials, such as the little dog who sings about having no bugs on him, for example, can be viewed online anyway.

For that matter, there are also some TV shows I've seen online.  I used to have a tuner card in my home computer many years ago, and then when we got the Media version of Windows, it came with an external tuner, and on those rare occasions when there were two good "somethings" on at once, hubby could record his on TIVO and I could record mine on my laptop.   But now I'm running wireless and don't want the baggage, so I've been looking around for a legal way to pull some shows in over my laptop without having to have any extra equipment.

Spreety TV Online : Watch TV Shows Online Free

The above link is sort of the mother of all free online TV resources. It has way more information about what is available than anyone could possible use and to help you wade through it they have several training videos on how to navigate over there and also many genre pages.  Before I headed on over to gardening (that would be the Home & Garden Online TV page), I noticed that there was a section on 4th of July fireworks displays.   So I got distracted by a few webcams links they had posted there.  Not TV, but apropos.  The real ones haven't started yet where I live, but we live near a resort casino that puts on a display every year and it is about time.  We should be able to see a few through the window any minute now. 

A Used Watch

Once long ago, when I was addicted to having a watch on my wrist,  I forgot to put mine on and headed out on a vacation.  My first stop was the beach at Carmel and even as I was lamenting about the fact that I was wristwatchless, guess what swept up on the shore right in front of me?  It wasn't a Rolex, but it was a very nice watch.  It was waterproof and running perfect time.  I wore it for the rest of that trip and for quite a few years thereafter.   Sometimes things like that happen.  If I ever lose something special, I hope that it falls into the hands of someone just like me.

The last thing I lost was my cell phone.  How embarrassing!  I replaced it with a much nicer one and was ever so glad to have lost it in the long run, but it was rather irresponsible.  Sometimes phones have personal stuff on them that could fall into the wrong hands.  This one didn't, and anyway it turned up  about three months later.   I had put it inside an eyeglass case in my suitcase.  Now I am wondering where those eyeglasses went.

Got Time on Your Hands?

I don't!  When I started carrying a PDA I stopped wearing a watch, and now that I'm carrying a smart phone, I stopped carrying a PDA. 

www.bestoftime.com

Best of Time sells new and "pre-owned" Rolex watches at substantial discounts.  If I were going to buy a Rolex watch, I'd definitely want a substantial discount.   I admire companies that go around the manufacturer's price controls, and offering second-hand items sounds like a great way to do that.  But a pre-owned Rolex?  I'd have to think about that one.

Ok, I thought a while and decided why not?  Besides, they come with a three year warranty and the company gives you seven days after you receive your watch to take it to a jeweler of your choice and have it authenticated.  I guess if the watch was giving off bad "vibes" from an evil original owner, that would happen within seven day's time as well.  The more I think about it, the better I like the idea of a used watch.  But if you disagree, no problem, they sell new ones too.

More Cool Stuff from the Neighbors

We are sorry to see a good neighbor move away, but when they have a moving out sale, that is a good way to pick some some inexpensive household items.  Here is one I got hold of yesterday:

  The size is approximately 30" high and 30" wide and as it was a bit heavy for me to lift into the back of our van, another neighbor graciously offered to wheel it home three blocks for me on the casters. 

Hooked on Baby Zukes

My neighbor Ruby really started something when she generously shared her locally grown veggies with me the other day.  I expected to like the yellow summer squash best, but the slender green zucchinis were beyond awesome.  They would have been delicious cooked any old way, but with no more seasoning than a bit of butter and fresh ground black pepper, the NuWave countertop oven nuked them to absolute perfection.  Now I want more! 

The 99¢ Only store is spoiling me too, with huge bunches of the teeniest baby asparagus stalks I've ever seen at such an affordable price.  I am smelling them cooking now!  Dinner will include Barilla Plus Rotini.  If I'm cooking something else in the Farberware Multicooker, I nuke pasta in there too.  They say not to do it, but I've never had a problem.  One less pot to wash.  I use the pressure cooking mode for beans too.  Times have changed.

In case anyone wonders how I got that "¢" typed in above, it is code "0162" but it has to be done on the keypad by holding the ALT key down, keying in 0162 and then releasing the ALT.  It doesn't work with the numbers above the qwerty. 

Here is a wonderful resource for alternate characters in Windows:

ALT CHARS 

Fun and Games

I openly admit to enjoying online games.  My usually stress busters are WorldWinner and King, but I am always on the lookout for new games.  When I first loaded a new billiards site called 8c1.net into Firefox, I couldn't quite get the hang of how to handle the cue. 

Here it is: 

multiplayer games

Right away I noticed that the game accommodates klutzes by matching a cue-challenged player with a compassionately dumb computer.  Thank you!  It is nice when the computer sometimes lets you win.  So far this one always let me win, but practice games with the computer do not count, of course. 

Obviously my Firefox was not compatible with this site, however, so I decided to try again with IE.  Once there the game loaded fast and I started sinking those balls right into the sockets.  Wheee!  My computerized opponent graciously sunk a few more for me.  It is unlikely that a live player will ever do that. 

8c1.net is a multinational multiplayer site with forums and chat.  It is simple to navigate with clean graphics and if you don't care to meet strangers, you can hang out your own friends in your own room.    There were quite a few people over there playing already even though it is a new site.  Its fun and its free.

Oh, oh!  They have snookers, too.  Now I'm done for...

Where Did the Bubbles Go?

When I first starting blogging, there was a whole brouhaha about disclosure and whether or not accepting payment for blogging was an "in" thing to do or not.  In this economy I think that snobbishness has died down a bit.  In my opinion, the whole fuss was kind of silly anyway.  Those who had wanted more and didn't want any competition and those who didn't wanted something.  I just wanted to learn how the whole thing worked.  PayPerPost, which has been good to me, and which I consider a great way to monetize a blog (and this, by the way, is NOT a paid post), used to give us little disclosure bubbles to put at the end of every post, unless the advertiser specified that they did not want disclosure in the paid post.  I've only seen that happen once, by the way. 

I don't take a paid post opportunity unless I think it is interesting and on the up and up.   One of my favorites was Arizona Game and Fish.  They honored this blog by allowing me to help them spread the word about boating safety by promoting their cute little video on the topic Don't Swim with the Fish a while back.  I did about 5 ads for them; 4 were unpaid.  People remembering not to drink when they drive is important to me whether they are in boats or on the highways.

Even though most of my posts are recreational and/or public service, I do pay a little for my blogging platform and tools and see nothing wrong with getting something back.  So somewhere on here there is a site-wide disclosure notice.  

By the way, the word brouhaha is French, dating back to the 19th century, but some dictionaries footnote that derivation as "imitative" and I rather wondered what it was imitative of.  Turns out some diabolical characters in drama used to mispronounce a popular phrase then quoted from the Book of Psalms, much like the apparently related Italian word barruccaba so that is one possible explanation.  Yes, it is meant to have a slightly derogatory connotation.