A long day on the road

There's nothing like a long road trip to put a little adventure into your life.

Since I wasn't driving, I got to read a lot of magazines today. I subscribe to Smithsonian Magazine, the magazine devoted to the interests of all the scanners in the world.

I'm a scanner.

Barbara Sher coined the word to describe people in her work as a life coach. Scanners are people who have a lot of interests either in sequence or in cycles through their lives. So since I'm one of those interested in lots of stuff, I like Smithsonian Magazine.

Not that you can't like it without being a scanner. Oh, boy. This post isn't about my personality.

Obvious, isn't it?

Back to the adventure. There really wasn't any adventure, simply a mishap. Just west of Peoria, my window rolled down, but wouldn't roll up! It sounded as if something was coming undone and I shrank away from the window thinking something might fly up and hit me, but nothing happened. It just wouldn't go up at all.

Using Google and OnStar, we called a dealership near Peoria, but the service department wasn't open. We called another dealership about 50 miles east and the guy there at Worden Martin Buick GM was so kind. He knew right away what was wrong, verified that he had the part and gave directions. Then he had a mechanic get right on it while we got a bite to eat and in no time at all it was finished and we were back on the road.

That was fun.

I had a hot pastrami sandwich at a dirty little place called Atlanta Bread Company. The sandwich made the dust and dirt OK. It wasn't filthy or nasty; it was just dirty.

Arriving near my mom's, I went to Arby's to get a little bite to eat. I had all sorts of restaurants to choose from, but I decided to splurge and went to Arby's so I could get a Jamocha shake. Yum!

Did I ever tell you about the time I went to the Arby's on 100th Street? They had just opened and there was very little on the street back then. I ordered a roast beef sandwich at the drive-thru speaker. There was a pause. The girl came on and said they were out of roast beef.

I laughed! She laughed! How funny. I moved on.

Tonight I ordered a small Jamocha shake. The shake machine was broken.

Oh, Arby's, you slay me.

I'll be in Ohio for some time. I hope to blog quite a bit. I'd like to do a little running and little sight-seeing. I'll take photos for you.

Eating well during my eat down

"I have such good news for you today," she said sarcastically.

Although I went to bed at a decent hour, I awoke early from a bad dream. I think I should be more awake than I am, but I feel sleep creeping dangerously closer and concentrating on work is difficult.

And so it's the perfect!time!to!blog!

What I have done all day (Ahem. It isn't even noon yet) to help me focus and stay awake is eat. I've eaten breakfast and lunch already. I'm not really hungry.

It must be true what they say about not getting enough sleep leading to obesity. I keep thinking it will help me wake up.

It doesn't.

For breakfast I had pancakes because I am tradition-bound and today is Shrove Tuesday. For lunch I had leftover oven-baked chicken and big, thick egg noodles with sweet corn from last summer.

I've been eating really well for a few weeks now because I'm hosting an eat-down at my house.

"Host" is such a strong word. I haven't invited anyone over or cleaned the house.

I just decided to clean out my freezer, but usually an eat-down is when I stay out of the grocery store and eat as much of what is in the house as I can stand. This is often accompanied by a sort out of the pantry. If it's expired, I toss it and if it isn't but I am not doing anything with it, it goes to the food pantry. I try hard to keep from throwing food away. I also try not to buy too much, but sometimes the canned goods and the freezer get away from me.

So cleaning out the freezer, which you know, takes time, turned into an eat down. Here's the current state of the fridge:

I may have cheated a little and not shown you the entire thing because I haven't cleaned it.

I've been too busy thawing, cooking and sorting to clean anything.

I often don't have very much food in the house these days. I look in the refrigerator and it looks OK, but there are three jars of jam and a carton of sour cream I had forgotten about and so it goes. It looks like more than it really is. I always sort of figure if I have a couple eggs, I won't starve to death.

[edit] You see the blank space to the left where the Swiss cheese is lounging all the live-long day? That's where the eggs belong. I just realized I don't have eggs. Can't make corn pudding. Does it count if I borrow eggs from a relative?

Anyway, the sour cream turned out to be just fine. I love food that lasts forever.

A friend of mine accepted a challenge from a food web site to clean out freezers and she wondered if I would do it with her. As a matter of fact, I had decided to take some things out of the freezer that very same day. So I said yes and now I report to her every day or so what genius things I've created.

I removed some beef, a whole chicken and some sweet corn from last summer. I've used pork, a ribeye steak, meatballs, noodles and freshly squeezed-by-me lime juice. From the pantry, I've made the soup and will make corn pudding this week. I'm down to four cans of beets (who buys this stuff? not me), three cans of creamed corn and one can of sauerkraut.

The beef turned into soup, the chicken went into the oven and was devoured and the corn got eaten along the way. I put the beef into the crock pot. It was a roast of some sort, but really small. I added salsa and when I got home, I added a little more fresh homemade salsa, a can of red beans and a can of creamed corn. It was delicious. Some thinly cut shoulder steak went into the crock pot with teriyaki sauce. Later I added a can of cream of mushroom soup and some mushrooms. I had that over potatoes.


It sounded like a mixture that may go radioactive at the table, but the teriyaki sauce and cream of mushroom soup behaved remarkably well together.

The only thing that didn't turn out is a recipe for a green bean side dish. I substituted Vidalia onion salad dressing for milk and used one can instead of two cans of beans and some Cream of Whatever was involved and although I ate a little I threw the rest away.

That's our secret.

As you can see from the photo above, I have the cutest Crock Pot ever and I buy meat at Target. I wait like a vulture for the end of the day when the meat gets little stickers on them for $3 off and I [*[pounce]*] on it.

Then I throw it all in the freezer when I get home so it doesn't expire and kill me. Who loves herself?

Oh and hey? I bought a DOZEN packages of Wholly Guacamole for 50 cents each over the weekend. They also had to go directly into the freezer, but that stuff is so delicious that if you put a bowl out and leave the room, angels will visit and sing.

Try it. It's very good.

There are still homemade pork tenderloins to be served and currently sitting in the fridge looking foolish is a pound of ground beef. I haven't any idea what to do with it when it thaws. I'm trying to stay out of the store and am making do with what I have. The corn pudding needs milk, so I may relent and buy a quart because I'll be using up eggs and some bread that needs to go before I leave town on Saturday.

Oops. See previous [edit].

I need to use the pound of ground beef without purchasing anything. Meatloaf maybe?

I've also been sorting and organizing cupboards, closets, drawers and all other storage areas. I've been ruthless about throwing things into a pile for our church's garage sale this summer.

My house feels a thousand pounds lighter and I just love walking into my dirty newly organized home. Only, like I said, I'm leaving it for a couple weeks on Saturday.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand

I just got the voting results from the company-wide first ever cookie bake-off.

I tied for first place with Crispy Oatmeal Cookies from Heidi! Yay!

Never able to make the decision between the two cookies and completely booked for last night so I couldn’t make more of just one batch, I brought both of Sunday’s batches in this morning.

I made Homemade Oreos (pain in the back) and Oreo Cookie Cookies (thank goodness I have a KitchenAid). The Homemade Oreos don’t look or taste like Oreos, so the name stinks. I love the Oreo Cookie Cookies, but they got cracky since Sunday.

They’re still really yummy, but when you first bite into them, they shatter and crumbs fly. But then…they get a little chewy and they’re wonderful. It’s a chocolate chip cookie with crushed Oreos throughout.

Scrumptious!



Anyway, I couldn’t decide which to enter and that doesn’t bode well for my future as a contest cookie baker because I think the choice was actually pretty clear.

Surprise development: The HO (PITB) cookies improved upon storage.

The day I baked them, they were awful. They tasted like a Little Debbie snack cake only… if you like Little Debbie snack cakes, you would like those better than these cookies. On the day. Day-of-cookies, not so much.

Still happy with the Oreo Cookie Cookies, I got home from work on Monday and I ate a HO (PITB) to see if I could make the decision and I was surprised that they tasted so different. The chocolate cookie wafer I had so painstakingly patted into existence hunched over the counter for hours with wet fingertips had taken on a little sparkly ‘snap’ without exploding into a million pieces. It was snappy and soft at the same time. The filling, which at first tasted like crap cheap Little Debbie knock-offs from the Dollar Store had become subtle and tasty.

I knew enough to know I had a decision to make. I also knew enough to know I needed someone to make the decision for me.

I was too close to the action.

I had fallen in love with my cookies. The toil! The labor! The struggle!

Tuesday night, co-worker and competitor John had written on Facebook that his cookies weren’t turning out. I formulated my plan.

This morning, dragging all the cookies into the office, I saw John. He was right near the entrance, which was good because I was in no mood to have to hunt him down. I said, “To my office!” even though I saw he was leaving for a client location.

In my office, I forced him to eat one of each cookie.

He said there wasn’t much of a choice – it was the sandwich cookie all the way and since I had already made up my mind that he was going to make the decision, that’s the one I put out.

He voted for my HO (PITB) cookies, too. Well, sure. He had some stock invested now.

After the contest, he sent me an email that said, "You're welcome. Just saying, you needed that vote." Then he followed it up saying 'Sabotage!'

Co-workers. Bah.



For the most part and in the midst of cookie fever, I didn’t do much of anything all day here at work. Why is that? I hear you asking.

I’ll tell you why.



Because Heidi, my tied cookie baking co-worker, was hovering and harassing people at the cookie display table, which was right outside my office door. I would pop up and tell her Stop canvassing at the polling station! Stop buying votes! Don’t stuff the ballot box!

When the vote count was in, I was called into someone’s office with Heidi. An account manager asked why we were being told before others and I said to him as I made my way that most likely it was a tie and they wanted to see the fight break out.

It was a tie. We high-fived, disappointing everyone in the office about the fight.

Word travels fast, you know.

On a similar note, did I ever tell you that in a random sort of conversation one day my boss said that in a fight between me and Heidi he was pretty sure Heidi would win?

I think he's right on that one, so I high-fived her and in my typically gracious manner, full of sportsmanlike conduct and all of the good cheer and happy manners I possess, I said,

“Thank goodness you didn’t win first place alone. You’d be unbearable the rest of the week.”

It was awesome! We joked around and smiled. Then we realized the glory had passed rather quickly. There was no prize, no ribbon, no accolades, no trip to Disney World, no cheering crowd, no speech from the Queen of England and no phone call from the President, so we went back to our offices and back to work.

Whatever.

Also, in yesterday’s breaking news, I won the local library’s Love Your Library contest and guess what I won?

A dozen cookies.

Nature Notes: Bald Eagles

Visit Michelle at the home of Nature Notes.

Saturday morning, I went for a walk at Red Rock Dam over near Pella and I let some eagles look at me. They were beautiful soaring overhead and ignoring me. At the end of the morning, we were all walking along (4 adults, a 3-year-old and a dog) when we spotted two eagles in a tree along the path. I went ahead alone and they stayed put. They were just up in the tree above my head.

Looking at me.

Like I was dinner.

They're strong, you know. Don't laugh.



I had just read a headline about starving eagles dropping from the sky in Canada. That stuff makes me sad. They should come to Iowa.



Their nests are huge. This is a zoomed shot, but it is on the other side of the river. You can spot their nests from quite a distance.



For information that is actually interesting and educational, check out the National Geographic website here.

It says, in part: The bald eagle, with its snowy-feathered (not bald) head and white tail, is the proud national bird symbol of the United States—yet the bird was nearly wiped out there. For many decades, bald eagles were hunted for sport and for the "protection" of fishing grounds. Pesticides like DDT also wreaked havoc on eagles and other birds. These chemicals collect in fish, which make up most of the eagle's diet. They weaken the bird's eggshells and severely limited their ability to reproduce. Since DDT use was heavily restricted in 1972, eagle numbers have rebounded significantly and have been aided by reintroduction programs. The result is a wildlife success story—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has upgraded the birds from endangered to threatened.

Stupid is as Stupid does

I didn’t tell you all about something that happened to me over the Christmas shopping season. I was in JCPenney stupidly spending money I didn’t have to spend when I wandered into their newly remodeled costume jewelry section.

I saw some rings and since I’ve been thinking about inexpensive rings for my middle finger for the last five years, I decided to see what they have. I tried on a ring that had some sort of idealistic, “we-are-the-universe” saying about hope and faith. I’m a fan of faith and patience, but they don’t market the patience part much. Or at all.

Anyway, I liked the ring and whatever it said didn’t make me laugh derisively at the universe.

Well to heck with the universe and its dumb self! It got back as me as, you know, the universe likes to do. Stupid universe likes the last laugh, isn’t that true? The ring was on a 2x3” piece of cardboard and securely attached with a thick plastic zip tie. I slipped the ring on my finger to see what I thought of it.

The ring wouldn’t come off.

I could tell it wasn’t too tight, but it was the saucer-sized cardboard keeping the ring from wriggling back and forth to get it off my finger. What a gloriously stupid way to display a stupid ring! Of course, it became a million times more stupid when it stuck on my finger like it had been hit by a spell from Harry Potter, Endora and Merlin.

You get what I’m saying? It had magically attached itself to me.

I worked it back and forth knowing all along that it wasn’t coming off and that I was making my finger swell.

Stupid, stupid ring and stupid packaging! I knew what I needed was to have the plastic zip tie cut off. I stood at the real jewelry counter with the $10 ring stuck on my hand. The guy behind the counter ignored me while he chatted with a customer about a watch battery.

Mind you, he wasn’t replacing the battery. Most places won’t do that anymore because Americans are such a litigious lot. I was ready to sue them for mental distress, myself. I moved closer. He wouldn’t even look up to acknowledge me. Stupid jerk.

I’m standing there with a dinner plate on my hand and he doesn’t notice. I’m a shoplifting arrest waiting to happen. I’m a frantic, panicked customer about to pass out.

Mr. Working on Commission doesn’t care about me and my $10 universe ring.

By this time I figure the security people have me in their sights and my finger is now angry and refusing to let the ring wiggle back and forth at all. I have visions of living forever in JCPenney’s jewelry department. The briefest idea flashes of buying the ring and taking it home on my cardboard-enhanced middle finger.

How ironic.

But by now, I HATE this ring with its stupid unrealistic, hippie freak-show saying and I’m done with it forever. I will never waste $10 on Stupid Ring! It mocked me with its hope and faith. I had hope and faith I wasn’t going to get arrested for shoplifting if they’d let me explain, but that was all the hope and faith I could muster just then.

I took myself down the escalator with this enormous meat platter stuck to my hand.

I stood in line at the customer service desk trying to will myself to keep my pale, Irish-heritage-living-in-the-snowy-Upper-Midwest complexion from blushing. The lady behind the counter was so kind.

I’m sure she laughed her head off in the lunchroom later on, but she was very kind. Unfortunately, she did not divine the problem without considerable help from me. She was incapable or unwilling to perceive intuitively or through some inexplicable perceptive powers my current helpless situation.

Probably unwilling.

Here’s how it went down:

“Hi, I was trying on a ring and it became stuck on my finger.”

“Oh, let’s see.” How could she not see? “Did you try to work it off?”

How much did I want to smack her?

She came up with a couple ideas and since I was using all the existing philosophical abilities I have in my body, which are minimal at best, I stayed calm, cool and collected. All York Peppermint Patty was I. Get the sensation.

I let her be a part of the solution as long as I could handle it. Then I said as nicely as I could manage and keeping the alarm out of my voice, “I think if you took some scissors and snipped the plastic zip tie, I could go into the bathroom and use cold water and soap to get it off.”

At this point, I’m fully prepared to buy the ring as penance.

Plus, as the ring’s owner, I would be well within my rights as a consumer to throw the blasted thing down the public toilet and flush.

“Oh,” she said. “That just might work. Let me find some scissors.”

Thanking God, literally, that there is still no one standing in line behind me, she ends the search for the only pair of scissors in the entire store and she snips the plastic zip tie.

Will you believe it? The ring slid off my finger without so much as a stutter or a catch.

I slid it toward her on the counter, apologizing for ruining the packaging. I said I thought I’d had enough of the ring and didn’t want to buy it. She was as nice as pie about it.

Lesson: Be nice to people who do stupid things.

Have a good day.

Update to Monday, Monday

For some reason I will never understand, the powers that be scheduled the at-work cookie bake-off on WEDNESDAY. There is no way I would have done what I just did on a Tuesday night. You won't know until Wednesday evening, or after the voting Wednesday afternoon.

Right now I'm devouring a roasted chicken from a freezer clean-out I did. That and garlic potatoes. Please stand back for your safety.

Sunday, Sunday Can't Trust That Day

OK, so according to the Mamas and the Papas, it's really Monday you can't trust. I think it's just too ironic for things to go wrong on Mondays so I usually refer to Tuesday as the day you get hit from the side. Naturally, it doesn't always work out that way, but you get my drift.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time in the kitchen today. My back is killing me from so much time on my feet hunched over the counter doing delicate maneuvers on not-so-delicate cookies.

I've been watching Golden Girls all day because I've really been too busy to concentrate on the television. This means I've seen the exact same set of commercials hour after hour after hour. It leads me to this revelation: The best advice I ever got from a doctor.

She said that lactose intolerance can be cured by drinking milk.

Somehow, I developed some intolerance to lactose years ago. That's a mystery to me since I'm a dairy loving fool. So I started to drink milk in little amounts when I was home to deal with the misery and can you believe it? She was right.

I was baking cookies all day. I won't tell you for sure what I finally decided to bake because my co-workers know about this blog. I don't know that they read it more than once a year, but they know about it.

Yesterday I spent the morning in Pella looking at eagles and letting them look at me. To stay warm, I ran in the snow. This led to a three-hour nap later in the day.

Then I saw two eagles in a tree right on the path. I had already trudged, alone, down the riverside to see some eagles, but they were really high up in the trees. One of them got all offended by my presence and took off. Then I trudged through more snow down a path and watched 5 or 6 eagles soar over me.

Back to the path. There they were, sitting there looking like eagles do. They have that look on their face that says they sort of hate you and they need to pretend you aren't really there. I have a photo that should knock your socks off, but you'll have to wait for Thursday's Nature Notes to see it.

That's been my weekend.

If you get hungry for cookies, wander on over. I've got a whole bunch. We can dip them in tolerant milk and watch Golden Girls.