Sodium dodging

There's a new extreme sport for middle-aged men, called “Sodium Roulette.” Here’s how you play:

1. Go to the supermarket.


2. Pick up something that sounds good.


3. Now, look at the label and see how much sodium there is in one serving. Write it down.


4. Repeat until someone goes over 2400mg of sodium. That person is out.


5. Last man standing wins!

Actually, I spent my lunch in the supermarket yesterday and actually found some good stuff. I’ve been trying to come up with some foods that are easy to fix in a microwave, don’t require refrigeration, are tasty, and not bad for you. I consider the trip a success, coming back with:

• “Instant” brown rice (I don’t consider 7 minutes cooking time to be “instant,” but whatever.)


• Cipollini onions (they’re small, so you can use whole onions and not have halfies left over)


• Albacore tuna, marked “very low sodium” (at albacore prices, naturally... ouch)


• Sardines packed in water (very little sodium, especially compared to packed in mustard or oil)


• Smoked oysters (more sodium than the fish, but still within reason)


• Low-sodium Triscuits (I was looking for Wheat Thin(g)s, but these will do)


• Bean sprouts (there’s a refrigerator at work, fortunately... I just didn’t want to fill it up


• Mrs. Dash Tomato/Basil/Garlic Blend


• Bananas

I have a few packs of ramen hiding in the back of one of my overhead bins; chuck the “flavor” packet and what’s left is the closest thing to instant pasta that I know of.

Googling for “cipollini onions,” I found some recipes for roasting them that sound absolutely divine as a side dish to beef or pork... but right now, I’m primarily concerned about what I can cook in the break room microwave. I cut up a couple of onions into the rice pot, threw in a small handful of bean sprouts, added some Mrs. Dash, and nuked the whole shebang then topped it with a can of tuna. The result was edible, if a little bland; I need to vary the ingredients a little bit and maybe toss in some green pepper. I’ll post a recipe when I get it right.

I’m thinking about how I can do something with the ramen & smoked oysters...

Weird news items

From the BBC, but worthy of News of the Weird:

Now you can blame “it” on the trees!

Pigs may not fly... but they glow in the dark?

Other things going on

If I haven’t posted in a couple of days, it often means I (temporarily) have gotten a life or something. I think in this case, it’s “or something.” Here’s what’s been going on.

I mentioned this in Vacation Reflections: at FAR Manor, we open our presents on Three Kings Day (Epiphany, Jan. 6). Or, like this year, work schedules can slide it into the weekend. So on Saturday, I got the 4-DVD Firefly series (highly recommended by David) and a Holy Grail T-shirt, showing the Black Knight with all his limbs hacked off and emblazoned in raised red letters: IT’S JUST A FLESH WOUND. The Boy got the same T-shirt, This is Spinal Tap on DVD, and a couple other things. Daughter Dearest got her iTunes gift cards, a betta tank (we’ll get the fish this weekend), and miscellany.

Mrs. Fetched got some stuff here & there, but what she needs is a Canon GL-2 to replace her business camera (a Sony of similar specs). The video circuitry went to hell on her while we were shooting the community chorale; fortunately the audio was still good & I was using my ZR-80 as a B-roll camera off to the side. With that, she was able to dub her decent audio onto my mediocre video and produce both CDs and DVDs for the chorale. One good-sized video job will cover the $2800 or so... if she can get a client who will pay quickly, we could get the camera on a “90 days same as cash” basis and not be out of pocket.

I’ve gotten hooked on She’s a flight risk, a blog purporting to be the diary of a young woman on the lam from her ultra-rich family. The link starts you off in the archives, which have been conveniently rearranged to go top to bottom (so you don’t have to scroll up to read). I seem to remember looking at it a year or two ago and then somehow forgetting about it.

Last night, I got myself a break and started working on setting up a computer for EJ, a friend of The Boy’s. It’s not the newest thing in the world — a PowerMac 8500/180 — but it will get him online and work for writing papers and the like. I’ll load it up with a few games and things too.

Working at home today. Time to grab a bowl of cereal and get to it.

The Young Mayor

Some time back, I wrote about Michael Sessions, an 18-year-old high school student who ran a write-in campaign for mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan — and won. I got to wondering how that all went down and started Googling; it would make a good follow-up, anyway.

Well... after several ballots were invalidated because you have to check the box and write the candidate’s name next to it, Sessions was still ahead by two votes. The incumbent, Douglas Ingles, then asked for a recount (well yeah, when it’s that close you pretty much have to). Things got touch-and-go when the city council found an ordinance that barred swearing in an official whose election was the subject of a recount, and called a special meeting on November 18 (the Friday before Session was to be sworn in).

Session himself found out about the meeting while at the Michigan/Ohio State game, and left the game to attend the meeting. A crowd of supporters packed the meeting as well, to see what was going down.

Mr. Ingles then defused the tension by announcing that he was withdrawing the recount request, and pledging his support for Hillsdale’s new mayor, which drew many cheers — probably more than he ever got as an elected official. On Monday, November 21, Sessions was sworn in as mayor in front of a huge group of citizens and media from around the US, as well as international media including Japan, Russia, and France.

Lansing Community College’s Lookout has pictures of the mayor at work and... not-work.

Sometimes, it’s best to fire a customer

So many manufacturers are willing to cut their own throats — or at least those of their employees — to get into Wal-Mart. Once in a while, you find an executive with the vision and nards to get out.

“Now, at the price I’m selling to you today, I’m not making any money on it. And if we do what you want next year, I’ll lose money... we have this independent-dealer channel. And 80% of our business is over here with them. And I can’t put them at a competitive disadvantage. If I do that, I lose everything. So this just isn’t a compatible fit.”

I wonder why it’s so hard to shut off a sales channel, even knowing that those sales are losing money and possibly costing you in other ways.

When spammers lose... we all win!

That’s gonna leave a mark.

CIS Internet Services successfully sued James McCalla over claims he sent more than 280m illegal spam messages.... The judgment further bans McCalla from using the internet for three years.

Too bad there wasn’t a one-way ticket to Abu Ghraib involved. Hey, if you’re going to torture something, nothing is more deserving than a spammer.

Smack the Penguin

Daughter Dearest praises this one with faint damnation: “this game is so stupid... but it's so much fun.”

1. Go forth and click.


2. Click the snowman to make the penguin jump.


3. Click the snowman to hit the penguin as he descends from the cliff

What's your distance? I got 587.something my first try, and haven’t beat it yet. Daughter Dearest has been working at it for a while, and beat it with 588.3 in between telling all her friends about the game.

I’ve been tagged

Carnacki got me.

OK, the rules of this little game are: reveal five weird habits about yourself, then tag five other bloggers. Fair enough.

1. The more I like a song, the more likely it is that I will make up my own lyrics to it.


2. I yank the occasional eyebrow hair that gets long (like, half my eyebrow long). That wouldn’t classify as a weird habit for women, perhaps, but I are not one of those.


3. I “clip” my toenails by notching them with a fingernail then zipping it off. I then drop them behind the headboard.


4. For whatever reason, I have a hard time with ending a project. I’ve been known to let them sit for months. I have no clue why.


5. I almost never watch TV. Probably has something to do with wanting to scream at the right-wing talking heads. (When Reagan was sleeping speaking, I used to moon the TV and yell, “FACE THE NATION!!!”)

Awright... that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know. But now it’s my turn. I think I’ll tag two C&J’ers, two Techcomm’ers, and one of the other folks. Hmmm... Mountain Cerridwen, Cosmic Debris, Voodoo Mike, Laugh Practice, and... hm... yup, Austin Post.

Born pure, salted to death

Given my aging-male issues (blood pressure, cholesterol), I decided to take a closer look at some of the labels on stuff I eat. I was surprised; except for that one weekend breakfast where we fix bacon & eggs, I don’t eat that much cholesterol at all. Through the week, I eat oatmeal when I get to work then have a pop-tart in the mid- to late morning; not much of the artery-clogging stuff.

But My God! the sodium!

It’s in everything, it seems. Even Coca-Cola (which I don’t drink much of) has a little! I had lunch at Subway today, and grabbed one of the nutrition charts they keep handy: most of the sandwiches have like 1100mg (or more) of sodium. Hunh? That’s as much as a cheap can of soup (the Healthy Choice soups are better). The sandwiches must absorb it from the Chinese restaurant about three doors down or something. “On average, Americans consume 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium daily” (recommended intake is 2400mg, just over a teaspoon of salt). No wonder over 25% of the population has high blood pressure!

I was already taking a hard look at cheese, thinking the cholesterol might be a problem there. Well, not so much as the sodium. Mom was telling me about touring a cheese-making operation last year; she saw them literally using shovels to throw salt into the batch. Low-fat Swiss cheese seems to be the best bet in terms of both sodium and saturated fat.

Even a slice of bread has 120mg to 180mg of sodium. That just floored me; I often make my own bread, so I decided to have a look at my own product. Aha... preservatives. My bread recipes call for about ½ tsp. of salt per loaf (and I tend to skimp on the salt anyway), the only sodium in any of the ingredients I use — at 14 slices per loaf, I get 82mg of sodium per slice. Yup, gonna be making my own bread from now on. And maybe slicing it just a little thinner, too.

When it comes to scary, Stephen King’s got nothing on food labels.

Eeeeeyaaaaaaaa!!!

That’s what it sounds like to this non-metal fan, anyway. The Boy just handed me a CD entitled, “The Death of Black and White,” which he says is the demo CD for his band. They finally got off the dime and did it! Six songs, a tad over 17 minutes, no “explicit” lyrics that I could tell (but I couldn’t catch about 90% of the lyrics anyway). Ironically, the track “29 Seconds” is the longest cut on the CD, nearly 4 minutes.

The sound is a tad muddy, no highs at all. I think they recorded it in somebody’s living room, but it’s better than I could have done (I tried in the detached garage last year). I’ve not figured out how to keep the drums from over-freeking-whelming the rest of the band; maybe the living room acoustics had something to do with it. Or maybe they put the drummer outside, or just recorded him separately and mixed the rest of it in. Or maybe they just had somebody who knows what they’re doing; The Boy claims the guy who recorded it was with Staind before they got big.

He came home with a small stack of CDs, which he plans to hand out to just about everybody he knows.

How does my (herb) garden grow?

With some inside, and some outside, and I can’t think of a rhyme at the moment.

As the colder weather came on, I dragged the pots in and out of the garage. That worked OK for a while, until it got into the low 20s one night and the basil started getting frostbite. Then I moved them inside, putting them on the coffee table by a window. Mrs. Fetched, for some reason, didn’t want them there (it might have had something to do with the basil almost touching the ceiling)... but I convinced her to wait until I got the carpet down in the outbuilding & things moved back in. That turned out to be a great idea, because she helped & recruited the boys to help as well.

So. In the outbuilding, with a window by day and a plant light by night: basil, marjoram, oregano, and thyme. The oregano especially is liking its new surroundings, shooting out several large sprouts, but the marjoram (after clipping dried stems and flower buds) and thyme are both showing plenty of new growth. The basil dropped a lot of leaves after its frostbite episode, but is showing some new growth here and there. I’m clipping off dried flower stalks and stems that don’t have any growth, hoping the rest of it will come back a bit better. Basil likes lots of light and lots of water, I’ve found — if I don’t water it every 2 or 3 days, it starts to wilt.

Outside: parsley, rosemary, and sage. That rosemary is one tough hombre — The Boy actually ran it over with the van once during the Summer of Discontent; it bent over and sprang back up like it was nothing. It wintered over like a pine tree, shrugging off the cold with aplomb. But my uncle (a retired chef) had the Food Channel on when we were visiting him (he lives fairly close to my mom & bro), and the Barefoot Contessa went out and clipped some fresh rosemary off a plant that must have been the size of some of our shrubs. Now where’s that plant food??? My mother-in-law uses sage in her canning expeditions; she knows she can get what she needs when she needs it. The parsley hung around and did OK through the summer, but really started thriving when the cooler weather arrived. I had a cilantro plant going, but it died for unknown reasons during the summer... maybe too much water.

I want to make a bed for growing garlic... but as cheap as garlic bulbs are at the supermarket, I might not bother.

Music to my ears

I’ve been following the Sony/BMG fiasco, which culminated in several lawsuits, for a while now. The New York class action has brought about some positive change:

Under the Settlement, SONY BMG will be enjoined from using XCP and MediaMax software on audio CDs they manufacture. SONY BMG will implement several changes to its policies and procedures concerning content protection software and the EULAs associated with that software. These changes will ensure that the content protection software will not be installed without the user’s express consent, will be removable from the user’s computer, and will not render the user’s computers vulnerable to known security risks. In addition, the EULAs will be written in plain English and will accurately describe the nature and function of the content protection software.

No more one-cheek sneaks, it looks like. And you thought class-action lawsuits benefit only the lawyers.

Vacation reflections

We got home at about 9:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, to a house full of people. Not only the extras we had when we left, but Mrs. Fetched’s brother, his wife, and their kids. We ended up playing euchre and dominoes until 5 a.m. (that I managed to grasp the Byzantine rules of euchre only goes to show how brain-fried I really was). We spent January 1 not doing much of anything; I was one of the first adults up at 10:30 (Daughter Dearest went to bed around 2 and got up around 9:30). I’ve found that I have a difficult time sleeping much past 9:30 nowadays, no matter how much or little sleep I get.

Yesterday, we went shopping. I think I mentioned that we (as a family) adopted the Hispanic tradition of doing our gift exchange on Jan. 6 (Epiphany or Three Kings’ Day) for several reasons, not the least of which is that it gives us 12 extra days to deal with shopping. Just in case DD or one of the other denizens has started reading, I will not go into details. Neener neener!

The brother & family stayed at our place until this morning: seems the gas company was dragging their feet about sending out a truck to fill their tank until Mrs. Fetched’s mom had a “little talk” with them. Sheesh. To make things even “better,” my cholesterol weighed in at 236 (about 30 points higher than what I expected, yucko). I’m hoping the eating & exercise habits I’m using to attack my blood pressure will also do for the cholesterol. But after only a handful of workouts, it’s taking more effort to get my heart rate up. The way things are going, I’ll have to start running marathons or something.

Chucked right back into the pressure cooker, it helps to reflect on the vacation a bit. We only went down to the beach once — we carried our kites, but it was too calm to fly them, so we walked some instead. The entire week was very nice, except for the flu I talked about earlier.


570 miles from FAR Manor, physically... light-years away, in another sense.

That water is cold, by the way!


Joking with Daughter Dearest, I told her Katrina washed all the dishwashing & laundry detergent out to sea, and the suds are washing up everywhere. In reality, it’s most likely just plain ol’ sea foam.


Back to dealing with reality. *sigh*

Home again

9-½ hours after leaving, give or take. Wife’s brother & his family is here for a little euchre & New Year’s celebration. So FAR Manor is full tonight & I have to go be a host or something. :-P

Outrage of the Day: Bush-league posturing

So you commit criminal acts by using the NSA to spy on American citizens. The news gets out, and what do you do? Stop the criminal acts?

Oh, heck no. Not if your name is George W. Bush, anyway. You go after the “leakers” instead.

I’m sure more readers of Tales from FAR Manor are intelligent enough to know this already: but if you still think this administration is anything but corrupt, you’re living in la-la-land. Period.

Happy b-day, Other Brother!

Hope you got lots of cool stuff!

Fingers crossed

My bro Solar came down with the flu yesterday — fever of 102°F and all. I brought some beef stew from Mom’s last night, then ran & got him some Gatorade this morning. He seemed like he was less than hungry for company, so I came over here to Mom’s for the afternoon. Got a bike ride in (I’m a day behind on exercise this week, foo) and now the bread machine is cranking away at tonight’s rolls. Daughter Dearest is napping, so I have the computer all to myself!

Things are quite a bit different here compared to FAR Manor, which has mostly to do with population density. FAR Manor is in a pretty rural area, sitting on acreage. Pinellas County FL is mostly a low- to mid-density sprawl — lots of low-rise condos, single-family homes, one- or two-story office buildings, and the like. I doubt there are 10 (dry) acres left undeveloped here, or at least 10 contiguous acres¹. At home, I have to go 10 miles just to get to town, 15 to a supermarket. Here, you can walk (or at least bicycle) to the supermarket, since you don’t have to go more than a few blocks to get to one... but going 10 or 15 miles is quite an expedition due to all the stoplights. Trade-offs everywhere you look.

DD and I are talking about going to see Chronicles of Narnia and eating at PJ’s, a seafood restaurant about a block from the beach, tomorrow. Hopefully, I won’t have the flu myself by then.

---

¹I consider a golf course to be developed. Of course, there are lots of those around here.

Vacation blogging

Daughter Dearest is hovering over my shoulder at the moment, wondering when I’m going to get off her computer so she can go back to IM’ing her online buds... hey kid, give me five more minutes, OK?

Internet access is a little restrained here... I need to buy mom an Ethernet hub for Christmas or something. DD is staying here at Mom’s, while my bro Solar is putting me up. He gets his Internet access at work, although he’s talking about having me help him put in wireless.

Have a great Christmas, or whatever holidays you celebrate at this time of year!

Score, big time

Putting stuff away in the outbuilding last night, I found two more short stories from my college days. That brings the total number of shorts found to five since I started this project. I would say those are all I have, but I’d completely forgotten that I’d written these last two... so who knows? Maybe there’s more....

The Ultimate Holiday Greeting

Daughter Dearest has been annoying the Red teachers at school with this one:

Happy Christeidholikwanzukah!