August 27, 2009
by infmom
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There are certain things that are inevitable in California at this time of year.
I would like to see a real volcano someday, but I don’t really like this substitution.
It sure looks like a volcano.
August 1, 2009
by infmom
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Image via Wikipedia
When I was in high school, my dad always referred to Creedence Clearwater Revival as “the doo-doo boys” because of their song “Looking Out My Back Door.” What reminded me of that, today?
This house came with the crappiest, most beat-up, miserable excuse for a back door imaginable. We talked about replacing it for years, and then finally got off our fannies and went to ReUse People (a salvage store) and bought a proper door, and then we let that sit in the garage for umpty-ump months.
Well, today we finally got to work on it and the job is almost done. One hinge needs to be shimmed and we need to install the new lockset (the old one fits fine, we just want one keyed like the front door) and wash who knows how many years worth of dust and fingerprints off. Honestly, the door looks like it’s the one that should have come with the house to begin with.
The door’s also got a lovely wavy glass window in it, so yeah…Â dooot dooot doooo, lookin’ out my back door!
July 14, 2009
by infmom
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I often frequent forums where political discussions take place (whether that’s the ostensible purpose of the forum or not). And over the past few years I have noticed something interesting.
It seems that a lot of people espousing the right-wing point of view have a noticeably limited knowledge of American history. I don’t know whether this is due to lack of education, or an over-reliance on broadcast bloviators, or some other common problem, but as I said, it’s noticeable.
So when someone espousing the right-wing point of view writes a message that demonstrates such a lack, and someone else answers the message politely, with facts that show the shortcomings in the limited, right-wing point of view, more often than not, the original poster responds the same way–instead of dealing with the contents of the reply in their entirety, or even dealing with most of the points that have been raised, the right-winger will seize upon one word, or phrase, and go after that with a chain saw. Just that one word or phrase, mind you.
I have often thought of reposting the original message with that bogus bone of contention edited out, and when the right-winger ducks the issue again by picking another word or phrase, I’d re-post again with that edited out, and so on and so on and so on till they’ve had to deal with at least one of the real issues.
Alas, that’d take weeks and bore everyone else in the forum to death.
It’s a shame that the right-wing bloviators condition their followers to think that all they have to do is repeat the talking points and everyone around them will agree. After all, it works that way with the carefully chosen audiences the devotees see or hear. Pity real-life people who don’t care for right-wing talking points don’t work that way, isn’t it?
July 2, 2009
by infmom
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I’ve been uncharacteristically silent of late. Not because I had nothing to say (I doubt anyone who knows me would ever believe me if I asserted that) but because a lot has been happening that is difficult to talk about.
Our cat Zoe had been having intermittent urinary-tract problems for quite some time. She’d seen four different vets and had every test imaginable and no one could figure out what her problem actually was. A few weeks back, she wasn’t eating well, but I thought it was just because she didn’t like the food we were giving her. We tried all kinds of different foods with no success, and then all of a sudden her breath started smelling like decay.
Naturally, this happened on a Sunday when our vet office was closed, so I took her to my daughter’s vet office which does have Sunday hours. By that time, though, she was very sick indeed, and ended up staying at the vet office for several days, with IV fluids, antibiotics and everything else they could think of.
We brought her home with instructions to give her antibiotics, a phosphate binder, and subcutaneous fluids. I learned how to administer the fluids, a process which both Zoe and I hated. But it seemed to be helping.
She spent about two weeks hiding in various places in the house and not going to any of her usual favorite places. Eventually I made a “nest” of sorts for her under a table in the office and she was quite happy there. We put a cat box here for her so she wouldn’t have to venture out (and so we could see whether she was using it). Slowly but surely she began coming out. She re-established her favorite place as the cat tree. She would sit in the tube most of the day, and purr if we reached in to pet her. That in itself was unusual. She was what I call a “stingy purr” cat, in that you could pet her and she’d only purr if she felt like it. As opposed to an “insta purr” cat like our other one who will purr if you look at him.
Finally, she started sitting on our bed during the day again and acting as though she felt well. Life was good.
And then…  last Monday, I woke up at 5:45am with the feeling something was wrong. Zoe was curled up on the couch and when I petted her it was clear she was in pain. I took her to the vet office as soon as they opened up. The news was as bad as it could be. Her kidney values were dismal and she was still in pain.
There was really only one choice. She was purring almost to the end.
It has fallen on my shoulders to make these decisions for every pet we have lost. It gets more difficult, and more difficult for me to recover from, every time.
Whether it was connected to that or not, this past Monday I had an attack of vertigo so bad that I ended up in the ER getting my head CAT scanned (and, as the old joke goes, they found nothing). It was after 1am when we finally got home, and of course sleeping on the waterbed was out of the question. So, for two nights, I slept on an air mattress on the office floor, which was surprisingly comfortable. The vertigo didn’t really go away till Thursday. I have medication to keep with me for the next time (and undoubtedly there will be a next time).
So that makes me a dizzy granny in a one-cat house. Where’s the fun in that?
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.June 16, 2009
by infmom
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My latest song parody.
To the tune of “Trouble in River City” from “The Music Man”
Well, either you’re closing your eyes
To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of the liberals in your community.
Well, ya got trouble, my friend
Right here, I say trouble right here in Ditto City
Why, sure, I’m a Limbaugh list’ner, certainly mighty proud
I say I’m always mighty proud to say it
I consider the hours I spend with the radio on are golden
Help you ‘preciate straight talk and a cool head and a keen eye
‘Jever take and try to find a lick of sense
When you’re hearing a sobbing Glenn Beck rant?
But just as I say it takes judgement, brains and maturity
To stick with the right-wing way
I say that any boob can take and read a book by Al Franken
And I call that sick
The first big step on the road to the depths of degreda-
I say, first – it’s wizards and witches at Hogwarts,
Then Chrstopher Hitchens!
And the next thing you know your kids are changing the channel to NPR
And listenin’ to some big out-o’-town lib’ral
Hearin’ him tell about education
Not a wholesome Bible school, no
But a place where they learn things right outta books!
Like to hear some lib’ral teacher start reading from Karl Marx?
Make your blood boil, well I should say
Now, friends, let me show you what I mean
You got one, two, three, four
Five, six commenters on Fox News
Anchors that see no difference between
The liberals on the air, with a capital
‘L’ and that rhymes with ‘hell’ where liberals go!
And all week long, your Ditto City youth’ll be
Fritterin’ away, I say, your young men’ll be fritterin’
Fritterin’ away their noontime, suppertime, choretime, too
Think the best of Obama
Never mind throwing teabags on the lawn or the taxes cut
Or Al Franken pounded
Never mind rooting for the right wing ’til your parents are caught
With a Democrat on election day and that’s trouble
Yes, ya got lots and lots o’ trouble
I’m thinkin’ of the kids in the gangsta outfits, young ones
Sneakin’ off to tune in MSNBC.
Ya got liberals, folks, right here in River City
With a capital ‘L’ and that rhymes with ‘hell’
Where liberals go!
Now I know all you folks are the right kind of people
I’m gonna be perfectly frank
Would you like to know what kind of conversation goes on
While they’re spinning across the dial?
They’ll be tryin’ out Rachel, tryin’ out Hardball
Tryin’ out Olbermann like socialist fiends
And braggin’ all about how they’re gonna
Get their Fox News clips from HuffPost.
One fine night they leave your rec room
Headin’ for the Democrat rally
Libertine men and scarlet women and hip-hop
Shameless music that’ll drag your son, your daughter
Into the arms of a jungle animal instinct massteria!
Friends, the liberal brain is the devil’s playground, trouble!
Oh, we got lberals
Right here in Ditto City
Right here in Ditto City
With a capital ‘L’ and that rhymes with ‘hell’
Where liberals go
Where liberals go
We surely got liberals
We surely got liberals
Right here in Ditto City
Right here
Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones
Moral after school – Our children’s children gonna have
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble…
{Freely}
People of Ditto City
Heed that warning before it’s too late
Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption
The minute your son leaves the house
Does he refasten his waistband below his butt?
Is there a Dixie Chicks sign on his favorite t-shirt?
U2 CD underneath the mattress?
Is he starting to memorize jokes
From Daily Show and Colbert?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like… hope?
And… ‘stimulus plan’?
Well if so, my friends, ya got liberals
Oh, we got liberals
Right here in Ditto City
Right here in Ditto City
With a capital ‘L’ and that rhymes with Hell where liberals go
We’ve surely got liberals
We surely got liberals
Right here in Ditto City
Right here
Remember John Birch, Billy Graham and Tail Gunner Joe?
Our children’s children gonna have trouble
Oho, we got liberals
We’re in terrible, terrible trouble
That place with the multicolored bird is the devil’s tool
Devil’s tool
Yes, we’ve got trouble, trouble, trouble
Oh, yes, we got liberals, we got lots of liberals
With a capital ‘L’
And that rhymes with hell
Where liberals go!
May 23, 2009
by infmom
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I don’t remember exactly when I took my first ride on a city bus. I do know I was in grade school at the time, and it’s just about 100% guaranteed that neither of my parents was with me.
My parents came from a society (bedroom communities of New York City) where men of substance rode public transit every day. There was no social snobbery aimed at men whose wives dropped them off at the train station for their daily commute, nor those who rode the subway to their upper-crust office destinations.
However, despite my parents’ everyone-who-is-anyone-in-NYC pretensions, we didn’t live there. We lived in central 
Virginia. And in central Virginia, riding the bus was for, you know, THOSE people. Even though there was a bus stop a block away, and a frequently-arriving bus that would transport him to a stop directly across from the front gate of the college where he taught, I can pretty much guarantee that the notion of riding that bus never once crossed my father’s mind. Ever. (If the car was out of order he’d get a ride with a colleague.)
Each morning, he’d pile us kids in the car, drop us off at school, and go merrily on his way to work, where he would park and leave the car for the rest of the day. That’s what men did. The fact that my mother therefore had no transportation didn’t enter into it, nor did the fact that we kids had to walk home from school, every day, regardless of the weather. (No, this isn’t one of those “uphill both ways barefoot in the snow” stories–most of the time, we didn’t mind walking that mile.) Needless to say, the idea of taking a bus anywhere didn’t occur to my mother, either.
However, I had no problem with it. If I could wheedle the money out of a parent, I could go all kinds of places. Two bucks would finance a trip to the movies downtown, plus drinks and popcorn, for my oldest brother and me, and my mom started trusting me to manage that destination when I was nine or ten. I got myself to school and back on the bus after I transferred out of the mile-away elementary school.
To be honest, I liked riding the bus then, and I like riding the bus now. Granted, I don’t ride it anywhere near as often any more–public transit in Los Angeles sucks, and getting to most useful destinations via the MTA can most charitably be described as slow. However, I take the local bus service to and from my class at the community college each week and I still feel the same about bus travel as I did as a kid.
There’s a great sense of equal community on the bus. Here we all are, from our different spheres, having one very important thing in common. We’re all on the bus. I have noticed that the old rules don’t seem to apply any more, though–in my youth, any kid who didn’t break land speed records getting up to offer his/her seat to an older person would be ordered to do so in no uncertain terms. Nowadays, I seem to be the only person who ever offers a seat to an older person, and for pity’s sake, I’m pushing 60 myself.
If you haven’t ridden a bus lately, give it a try. Pick someplace you can get to easily and go. You might be pleasantly surprised by the experience–if you can get some zoned-out kid to give you a seat.
photo credit: Xaragmata
May 9, 2009
by infmom
0 comments
Diabetics have a love/hate relationship with food. For many of us it’s a life/death relationship as well. Once you get that diagnosis you will never look at food the same way–or you shouldn’t, if you want to live long and prosper.
Those of us who have Type 2 can often, if the diagnosis comes early enough, keep our blood glucose levels under control by carefully choosing what we eat, and by making sure we get some kind of exercise every day, without taking any of the various medications available. That does, however, mean that one’s dietary restrictions will almost certainly impinge upon one’s social life and other interpersonal connections.
I managed with diet-and-exercise for about four years after the diagnosis. Unfortunately, for most of that time span I worked for someone whose culture places a very high regard on food and eating, and who could not or would not understand what I needed to do to stay healthy. I could not “just try” the greasy, sugary stuff that appeared on the office tables during parties. I could not have regular soft drinks. And I could not go to the staff Christmas party that was to be held at a restaurant whose set menu for large groups involved large servings of grease and sugar. (Well, let me amend that–I could certainly have gone to the restaurant, but I couldn’t have eaten anything there, and I didn’t particularly want to contribute $30 to sit and drink coffee while everyone else got to eat.)
It was an unresolvable impediment to my relationship with my boss, and neither of us ever found common ground. I did my best to explain, but I was left with the impression that she thought I was being stubbornly unreasonable. Ah well. Water under the bridge.
It’s been eleven years now since I got the bad news and I’ve progressed through various oral medications and am now 
on insulin. That does not bother me. In fact, it’s so much easier to deal with that I’ve found my dietary choices actually expanding just a bit. I don’t have to drink vile tasting diet soda any more. Granted, I can only have one small cup full of regular soda (the kind that’s sweetened with sugar, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment) but I grew up in an era where a 6-ounce bottle of soda was considered one serving so I’m fine with that. By the way, should any of you be in the same situation, I can wholeheartedly recommend the book Using Insulin. It explains everything.
Being on insulin often means weight gain. Your body isn’t flushing out calories through the kidneys any more and is actually able to use more of what you consume, and guess what happens next. I have gained a bit of weight and am now making a very concerted effort to reverse that. As part of the effort I am turning much more of an eagle eye on the content of the foods I consume.
The first thing I did was eliminate to the fullest extent possible anything that contains high fructose corn syrup. I know there’s no absolute proof that it’s harmful to health, but (despite what a Del Monte representative told me when I complained about the change in the ingredients in their ketchup) it is an unnatural product, and if there’s anything we denizens of the USA in the 21st century ought to get through our heads, it’s that the more we try to fool mother nature the worse off we are.
The second thing I did was to do my best to increase the amount of dietary fiber I consumed each day. That wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as was getting rid of HFCS. Besides consuming more fruit, vegetables and whole grains I added fiber supplements, and have seen quite a few benefits already. My blood sugar is under much better control and I am using noticeably less insulin than I did even a month ago. And yes, I’m losing weight. Who knew it could be this simple?
What got me to thinking about this? I went grocery shopping today. Since I was a kid I’ve preferred the taste of Miracle Whip over mayonnaise, but of course eliminating HFCS from my diet meant no more genuine Miracle Whip on my sandwiches. I found that the Ralphs and Vons store-brand analogues did not contain HFCS so I was happy. Today I picked up a jar at Ralphs and found they’d changed the ingredients. Growl. I had also been buying Del Monte ketchup because it did not have HFCS (did have regular corn syrup) but they changed ingredients too. Now I buy Ralphs store brand “organic” ketchup. I have had to find different brands of pickle relish, salad dressings (hooray for Newman’s Own!) and other condiments. Many’s the processed food item I’ve had to talk my husband into putting back on the shelf. I stopped buying coffee creamer (just as well, it was mostly chemicals anyway–now I use considerably less half-and-half in my coffee). I now carry my reading glasses in my purse so I can give those ingredients a focused fish eye.
Is all this food-picking quixotic? I don’t think so. If more of us refuse to buy chemical glop and choose instead to buy the less-processed, less-chemical foods, the food companies will eventually take notice of what sells and what does not. So far, it seems that the companies that make store-brand products have not found it unprofitable to use the more natural ingredients that the big agribiz companies have replaced with chemical glop. I do see that Pepsi and Coke are dallying in the sugar-sweetened-beverage market a bit beyond Passover season, so there’s hope.
As a diabetic I will need to be careful about what I put in my mouth for the rest of my life. As a consumer, I’d like to think I’d be doing the same no matter what.
May 4, 2009
by infmom
0 comments
Lifehacker today did a story about storing coffee beans. Which got me to thinking about coffee in general.
My parents were big coffee drinkers. They had one of those old-fashioned stove-top percolator pots that was featured in the Maxwell House commercials that so many people of my generation remember. The pot has a basket inside, into which you put the coffee grounds, and you fill the pot with water and put it on the stove. As the water comes to a boil, it shoots up the stem that the basket sits on, into the glass knob on top, and falls back down into the grounds. That water steeps through, drops back into the pot and gets re-perked. The down side of this is pretty obvious; you can end up with coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in in short order. Plus, you have to keep an eye on the pot and turn it off after whatever the brewing time is. That’s where my parents had problems.
My mom was prone to going off somewhere and zoning out and forgetting about the pot. She boiled them dry on a regular basis and once even left it so long that the aluminum actually melted into the stove burner. After paying for someone to fix the stove, my dad decreed that from then on they would drink instant coffee. (My mom would then put water on to boil in a saucepan on the stove, zone out elsewhere, and…  well, you get the picture).
Regardless of how the coffee was brewed, my parents poured a lot of milk and sugar into it. They would take the wet spoon out of the coffee, dip it in the sugar bowl, and leave chunks of coffee-congealed sugar behind. My brothers and I raised major objections to this, since we didn’t want coffee lumps in our Sugar Coated Sugar Sprinkled Sugar Soggs cereal in the morning.
I always liked the smell of brewing coffee, but loathed the taste. Every time I was offered a sip I’d try it and gag. But I loved coffee ice cream, go figure! I could never figure out what the difference was and why one would be nauseating and the other delicious.
Fast forward many years. I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and thus had to revamp my entire set of common food choices, including beverages. Since I thought diet soda tasted vile (something I have not really changed my opinion about over the years) and I got tired of drinking water, on one business trip I decided to try a cup of coffee with just some cream in it.
What a revelation. It wasn’t the coffee I had loathed so much, it was all that milk and sugar!
Not long afterwards, my daughter got a part-time job at Starbucks to help pay her college expenses. One of the benefits of being a Starbucks employee is a free pound of coffee per week. And so I became a free-coffee beneficiary and got a coffee grinder and thus entered into the wide world of coffee culture. I had never set foot in a Starbucks till my daughter started working there, and she had to write down for me what she thought I should order. I’d never heard of “caramel macchiato” in my life.
My son worked at Starbucks for a time, too, and thus my supply of free bags of coffee continued. I got lazy. I’d take whatever was brought home. But after he left Starbucks I had to start making my own decisions about my own coffee. I tried Armenian coffee from the international market up the street. I tried small-roaster brands from Whole Foods. I tried the in-store-roasted coffee from Costco. Then I started experimenting with cans of coffee from Trader Joe’s. (All the while ignoring all those mailers from Gevalia.)
Well, gang, I think I have finally found a winner. Scandinavian Blend from Trader Joe’s. Best combination of taste and price I’ve found in all my travels. It’s so good it tempts me to have more than my one cup of regular coffee per day (I’m sensitive to caffeine so I have to be careful how much I consume, and when). With just a little half-and-half in it, brewed in my Aeropress, it’s as close to perfect as it gets. At least for me. (That’s an Aeropress on the left, and if you haven’t tried it you have missed out on some really extraordinary smooth rich coffee… I’m convinced it’d make even Folgers taste good).
Are you a coffee drinker? Do you go to great lengths to store and brew “properly” or do you just dip out of the can from the supermarket and enjoy the ease of use? Have you signed up with Gevalia? I’m still not convinced about those guys. 🙂
photo credit: phlora
April 17, 2009
by infmom
0 comments
Last post over a month ago. Ye gods. It’s not that I’ve been unusually brain dead since then. It’s just that life and computer whoopsies seem to be eating up my time. Yeah, I know, the blog pundits always say don’t make excuses, just get your butt in gear and start writing.
Miscellaneous observations, to get me going again:
Keith Olbermann can, as I mentioned, be an impossible windbag, but when he’s on his game he’s amazing. And I wish I could have posted a tribute to my mother as loving as the one he did.
Corollary: The MSNBC crew had entirely too much fun with the “teabag” double-entendres last week. Too bad the Fox Noise crowd wasn’t watching.
I happen to like fixing computers (anyone want to hire a part-time tech? I am available!) which turns out to be a good thing because my computer’s been giving me fits for weeks. Firefox, and only Firefox, will neither open nor save document links. Although I used TweakUI to tell XP to log me in automatically, it keeps getting changed back and I keep seeing the login screen. Some directories take forever to show up in Windows Explorer. A couple of days ago I completely lost network access, and with it my internet connection and the connection to the laser printer. Naturally, on the day I had to print out checks from Quicken. Oh, and the black ink cartridge in the inkjet printer was dead. I thought this was a hardware problem due to aging motherboard, but to make a long story short it was a software problem and I still do not know what caused it, but going back to an earlier restore point at least fixed that.
Yes, I have scanned the computer multiple times with multiple anti-malware apps, and the only thing that turns up is cookies stored in the middle of backup archives that I really should just for pity’s sake store on DVDs and remove from my hard drive.
Our cat Zoe has been peeing blood, intermittently, has been tested for everything two vets can think of, and nobody seems to know why. Just on a hunch, I switched the cats to eating mostly canned food. Crossing fingers–no blood in the urine the past couple days. And Zoe is eating like there’s no tomorrow. Premium canned food is more expensive, but considering it cost us over $400 the last time she saw the vet…  yeah, I’ll buy the cat food and never quibble about the cost.
I set up a Facebook account to join the group discussing Dr. James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty. Those discussions are well worth while, but I have no clue what to do with Facebook otherwise. I did friend most of my nieces and nephews and some old classmates. I guess that’s a start.
Part of the reason I’ve been such a lethargic poster lately is that my internship with Lifehacker came to an end at the end of last month. I knew going in that it couldn’t last forever, but the ending seems to have made me sadder than I realized. I took a full week off posting, just did the minimum necessary to manage my CompuServe forums, and turned off the computer early in the afternoon. I guess that counts as a vacation of sorts. We who work from home don’t get paid vacations, but at least I kicked back with library books and did some housecleaning. The first couple days I pretty much moped around the house all day, but eventually I got outside and rode my Vespa for a while and that cheered me up remarkably.
This is spring break from school so I did not have to get up at 5:30am today to catch the bus to campus. For a non morning person like me, that’s the treat of the week.
I’m signed up for the “31 Day Blog Challenge,” but I’m already three days behind. I hope this is not an indicator of future lack of success.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.March 12, 2009
by infmom
0 comments
Image by afagen via Flickr
I watch Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC from time to time. Even though I find myself in agreement with him now and again, I still think he’s a self-important windbag. I liked him a lot more when he had a mustache and was doing the sports on local TV.
Still, he is rarely in better form than when he goes after that other self-important windbag Bill O’Reilly. And yesterday’s show was a prime example of the genre.
I was still chuckling when my son got home yesterday. “When one windbag goes after another one,” I began.
“You get a cyclone,” said my son.
