Well, not quite, but it quit and then got very hot. I use a Dell. If you recall the viral internet pic of the Japanese businesssman recoiling in horror from a burning computer, you may remember that Dell and several other computers were getting batteries from, I think, Sony; and there was a little thing called The Battery Recall.
Well, it didn’t catch fire, but it could have. I’m glad Jane noticed how hot it had gotten, or we might have had a fire.
We had breakfast on the patio this morning, but a check of the water temperature showed 50 degrees, so we have officially stopped feeding the koi. Their systems shut down at 52, and while, in the sunshine, they are up and moving about and picking at the pond algae, that’s their choice, and it’s not going to give them the gastric problems of tummies packed with food. They are heading for hibernation. Sigh. They eat out of our hands, now. They’re such little pigs. But we’ve got to let them eat just the pond algae for a while.
We hope to leave the filter running through leaf-fall, and get all the leaves out via the skimmer, before we shut down the waterfall and pull the pump for the season. At that point we’ll install the heaters, which will switch on any time the water heads for 32 degrees, and keep a circle of water exposed to the air, open to release the co2.
They probably won’t really eat again until April.
Let’s see…what else? I got my glasses ordered. I’m getting two pair, one to help my visual acuity when I am wearing my monofit contact, and one for without. Ordering them from Costco, they’re not that expensive: nice but plain frames: I don’t wear them in public much, mostly when I’m working; and if they get dinged up, (I’m murder on frames) I won’t let them get as dinged-up as the last pair, which had sprung badly and was no longer straight. It was a question when one or both earpieces would actually fall off.
It says something that I actually ordered the glasses and the old ones have still not shown up. They are sincerely lost.
OSG dropped by and we went to Swinging Door last night. I didn’t have to cook. 😉 But today I thought I’d buy some deli ham, and went to Safeway. Safeway has lost their mind. I got the last ham at Freddy Myers for 1.91 a pound, admittedly on sale; and very nice sliced roast for 5-something. Safeway was charging 7.98 a pound for deli ham. I bought two ready-made sandwiches and came home. This was a mistake. Jane and I ate the sandwiches and now don’t feel so good. They were Wonder Bread sandwiches, and we’re not used to that kind of bread, I think. Ugh.
At any rate, Safeway is off my list of places to shop: their 10 cents a gallon off gas gets used up fast at that rate. I think I’ll drive the extra mile to Rosauers, or 3 miles over to Freddy Myers, if it comes to that. The only thing I’ll still buy at Safeway is bread—not the Wonder Bread sort: the very nice Artisan Bread they’re willing to sell half-baked and frozen like a brick. Pop that into a 420 oven for 20 minutes and it is to die for.
Well, we had better lay in a supply of mulch ASAP. The promised rain has not arrived, but it’s nippy out there, and we’re going to need to cover those new plantings and mulch the roses. We’ve also got a pair of young tree peonies that need coddling. The moonflower may not bloom before the first frost, though it’s trying: the morning glory on the other side of the gate has been blooming its head off, and the two vines have almost met atop the arch.
I have ordered a new power unit. Pity: the one that ‘sploded was the one that isn’t done up in electrical tape from having its cord caught in the recliner mechanism. It was the pristine one.
I’m there with you on Safeway going insane. If you are going to be shopping at Freddies, you might want to try the 1/2 baked bread they carry in their bakery section. It’s a thin baguette that you finish in the oven at home. I’m sure you could freeze it as is for use later if you want, though I have never tried that myself. All in all, it’s quite good.
Thank you! And welcome in!
Costco is good for food if you can stand the quantities. I find keeping my refrigerator just above freezing allows me to keep most things in good condition well past their best-before dates.
If you really like deli-sliced meats, you might consider getting a slicer so you can get the big inexpensive cuts. Slicers themselves are pretty pricey last time I looked, though. Of course, if you’re adept with a knife, you don’t need the slicer.
We do get a lot of things from Costco: the only things we don’t get are the ones we can’t use fast enough. They’re particularly good for eggs and canned goods.
Are the soups in yours as bad as mine? Clam Chowder, okay. Anything else, you have to buy 4 cans of chicken noodle soup to get 4 cans of something else–and the something else is usually chicken twisty noodle (there’s a difference?), chicken rice, or chicken something else. In any case, I’m *so* tired of chicken noodle, even if I buy something I’d really like (lentil, beef noodle, minestrone–not that I’ve seen that staple!) I’m going to suffer a severe mischief to my home if I’m force to eat the chicken noodle “tax”!!
Sigh. You really, seriously, need to get with the people who are trying to get a Trader Joe’s into Spokane. TJ’s is starting to open new stores again. (They could have despite the recession since they’re owned by–of all things–German billionaires.) A new, bigger store opened near me. I found some, “3 Plus Blue–Mozzarella Granna Padano Parmesan & Gorganzola Cheese,” flatbread. Truth: a couple of employees were puppy-dogging behind me so I could show them where I found it!
And you know how grumpy checkers are in normal supers? Somehow, Trader Joe’s keeps their “crew” really happy. It’s a pleasure to talk to them and go there, which undoubtedly helps the employee morale as well.
You gals get down even to Yakima(?) or Redmond, check one out. Two Buck Chuck ($3 or $4 outside of CA, I think) is an outstanding wine at an insanely low price. I did a *blind* tasting just a month ago (I was “blinded,” too!) , and Two Buck Chuck performed comparably to $11 Clos du Bois–a very good wine, and different, but worth the difference? The panel says no.
Take a cooler–you will need it. They also used to have bulk catnip. I haven’t looked for it recently so I’m unsure, but you’ll be able to find something for your feline friends. 🙂
I have no financial interest in TJ’s. Unfortunately, it’s privately held. ^&%*$
Well, TJs do stash the chocolate right at the checkstands.
(I go in for the salads, on some weekends, and the dried fruits on others – mine is conveniently next door to a Smart&Final, where I buy trail mix in several flavors. Costco’s trail mix has too much candy and not enough fruit for my taste.)
Try the WASABI WOW trail mix. It has wasabi peas in it. Yum! You can also get just a bag of wasabi peas. I brought some of each to a party: the trail mix for everyone and the peas to keep a lady friend from picking the peas out of the trail mix! And since I had committed a slight rudeness, I felt, also as a peas offering.
If you want soup, it’s really easier to make it yourself than it is to buy it. You get to put in just the things you want, and can control the amount and types of spices. It does help to have freezer containers, so that you can pop extras in the freezer. I made my first official soup of the season this week… mushroom-barley-chicken. Half of it is going to get frozen so that I have fast meals later on.
Yeeks! A’splosions are baaaaaad! (So are electrical fires!) And of course it figures it’d be the nice one, not the one that could do with replacement anyway. My laptop does sometimes get wickedly hot on my lap (I put it on a large book/board) or on my wrists where the rest on the keyboard/body (I rest my writst on folded paper or washcloths), but nothing that hot, ever! I hope the new unit works well!
We’re already having massive rain (within the last hour, even!), but I’ve no garden in my dorm, as plants and I do not agree (I’ve killed many flowers-in-little-pots from neglect, and a cactus from too much care—read “water”, lol, it turned bright green and squishy and flopped over). I did try a rose two years ago, but it got covered in those itty-bitty spiderweb mite-things and kind of scared me, so now it lives in my parents’ garden with some other rosebushes for company… and I have no living things at the moment. On the plus side, one of the two fishes I rescued from the girl’s toilets my freshman year is still alive! The other died within days (trauma and non-oxygenated water, probably… lots of fishies didn’t even make it out of the bowl—shame on the pranksters who put them there!).
Bad, re the fishies prank! They also don’t tolerate chlorine or water chlorination. Good you rescued the little guy.
Spider mites are a PITA. One of my best indoor successes is a bottle palm. You can’t kill them,they store water in case of drought, so if you just soak them every few weeks, they’re great. They get large, however. But they are resistent to just about anything. We had one in a giant pot that Efanor loved to get into when he was a kitten, before we gave it away (we moved). He’d chase his tail round and round the ‘bottle’, under the streamers of the leaves.
Hmm… I may have to look into that… see just how big “big” is 🙂
The cactus might not have been too much water – there’s some kind of bacterial disease that does that, and water may or may not be involved. I’ve had some go that way, and a couple of others sunburned to death, but some of my prickly pets I’ve had since the early 90s.
A cold front went through Los Angeles yesterday, and it was in the low 60s this morning: cool enough to call for a light jacket. (Makes a nice change from last week’s baking!)
If that’s the case, I don’t feel quite so bad, lol!
Yuck, forget the Safeway deli sandwiches, use a food processor to slice the meat and cheese yourself! Get a thin-slicing blade, you can take care of a turkey breast or a roast beef chunk in seconds. I have had SO MANY bad experiences at Safeway that I will never shop there again. Sorry about the bad tummies from the Wonder Bread, stay away frmom that stuff! 🙂
I gringe over Safeway’s prices for just about everything, alhtough I never knew about the 1/2 baked bread deal. Sounds fabulous! but definitely check into the meat slicer. You can get meat slicers that are pretty compact and around $40; Rival makes one and did Krupps [not sure if there’s is still around, but a saw one that looks identical made by Rival at Target a year or so back]. We also have french dip as part of the leftovers from roast beef. Yum! You may need to get a different blade for ham or turkey, but should be pretty easy. Deli prices will kill you.
last summer I very proudly did a Costco run in which among other things I bought a huge bag of basmati rice, as we are big rice eaters. Unfortunately bugs appeared in all the rice canisters last week, and we had to throw it all out. I never had bugs in rice before. These were small and red, and now they seem to be flying around the house.
*screams at flying bugs*
Carolyn, while I think of it: Costco gives me a new set of lenses (same rx) within the year. No charge. If they didn’t tell you about it be sure & inquire.
They told me to try to hold back on taking advantage of the new lenses until a few weeks before the end of “my” year. You’ll have to give up the frames for the 1-2 weeks Costco puts in the new lenses. This benefit was a real boon because my lenses get quite scratched, especially when stepped on….
My thing is sitting on them, usually, but I have also trod upon them, dropped them on the pavement, and lost them into the couch cushions. I am absolute DEATH on frames…my last pair was about half an inch out of touch with my left ear, so it’s probably just as well I dropped them wherever I lost them.
While I shop at BJ’s instead of Costco, the same may apply there:
They seem to have no objection to readjusting my glasses many times over the two or three years I keep them, even past the 12 month warranty period. My kids will occasionally decide to wrestle me down and end up pulling my glasses out. My next trip to BJ’s and they are almost as good as new!
– S
I have a singular talent regarding sitting on mine too. The best one was when we were back in Michigan for husband’s 35th reunion [the first one he was going to]. We’re all dresses, ready to go, when I decide to sit down on the bed to fix squewed pantyhose. Right on the glasses which popped a lense thataway and pretty much folded them like an oragami crane. I can’t drive without them or see with any certainty of recognition beyond 7 feet. We managed to find a Walmart with a couple of girls in the optometry section who worked magic straightening them out so we could go to the reunion and I would be guaranteed to see for the rest of the trip — which included a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago to see the Tut exhibit. I was profuse in my thanks and never, ever put the wretched things on the bed again.
Several years ago as I was backing the car out of the garage I heard a very strange sound. I got out and looked, but couldn’t see a thing so continued on my merry way.
OSGuy phoned later, mystified: he had discovered a pulverized mass of flattened metal and glass. Reconstructing things, that odd sound was from backing over a pair of reading glasses after, unnoticed, they had fallen from the perch on my head. I hadn’t seen anything because the tire was still resting squarely on top.
I’ve just picked up my new lenses; increasing age has meant that I’m now sufficiently short and long sighted that ‘monovision’ (one eye for long, the other for short) gives me headaches. I’ve had to accept that reading glasses are inevitable. I haven’t lost them yet – but then it’s only been a matter of days… 😉
I feel like I’m in some weird Mommy Mode BUT, CJ, MAKE Jane get that tetanus shot…and while you’re at it take care of yourself. People who fix and clean as much stuff as you do owe it to themselves, family and friends to take care of themselves. There! Dismount from hobbyhorse completed. I’m on Apple so I don’t have many problems, but I watched my boss’s laptop start smoking. Much excitement, flinging said laptop into the parking lot and using the fire extinguisher. May we always live in interesting times.
Glad to hear Lynn is ok. GET THAT SHOT!
Emilyrin, Targus makes a laptop cooling stand that has two fans in it. It’s powered by the USB port on your computer, although if you only have 2 ports like mine, I have to sacrifice either the keyboard or the mouse receiver to use it. I think I paid around $25.00, although I must confess I bought it at the Air Force Base Exchange, and they are usually a little cheaper. It does a nice job of circulating air under the laptop although I don’t think it works well on your lap, but best on the desk or tabletop.
I have an antiquated iBook (vintage 2000) which had a power connector thingie that started shooting green sparks one day. Luckily, I was sitting right there and rapidly unplugged everything so there was no fire. Turned out Apple had gotten a rash of calls about it, and they promptly sent me a new one which I watched v-e-r-y carefully for about the next year. The only hardware trouble I’ve ever had with one of my Macs.
Re: flying bugs. My roommates used to buy bulk food at one of those whole foods type stores, but after our 4th (FOURTH) experience with Indian meal moths, they stopped buying there. We had to throw out EVERYTHING that contained meal — all the cereal, flour, oats, pasta, and for some reason, dried fruit — in fact, pretty much everything that wasn’t in a can or in Tupperware (that’s Tupperware with a capital T, not Rubbermaid, which can’t hold them out). We lost hundreds of dollars worth of food. We even found the damn little worms under the labels on the plant holders — apparently they were held on with some sort of flour-glue. We had to have exterminators 4 times, take the cats out of the apartments (this happened in several places), wash absolutely everything in the kitchen and buy hundreds of dollars worth of Tupperware to store stuff. One of the exterminators told us that freezing the items bought at that store would kill the little buggies, but as far as I’m concerned, if it’s infested, I don’t want to be eating it in the first place!
I don’t know if what you’ve got are Indian meal moths, since I don’t remember them being red, but you’re going to want to keep an eye out if they are. They get into EVERYTHING. And leave little webs and worms behind. Seriously disgusting.
Put the stuff in the freezer for a few days, if you can. It kills the bugs. (We did it all the time with oatmeal.) Helps with raisins too – that’s the dried fruit I’ve had the most trouble with, and it’s definitely off-putting.
(At the moment, all the raisins I have are either in the fridge, as part of the trail mix, or in jars, being Very Happy Raisins from the other contents of the jars: rum, triple sec, or a mixture of the two. Someday I’m going to make James Beard’s mother’s raisin bread, which calls for Very Happy Raisins.)
Oh yummy … One of my favourite ice cream flavours is Rum Raisin (Braums, CJ). Unfortunately it hasn’t been seen here in a number of years … some of the folks hereabouts objected to the rum in it even though it was an artificial flavouring. Just par for the course.
Sigh.
Meal moths are a nightmare. I used to live in South Germany where they were rampant – you could come home with something from the supermarket, open it, and there they were. I learnt to double-wrap _everything_. The problem was that they were also getting into paper, and there is just no way that I could look through all of my posessions and eliminate them. I’ve mostly gotten rid of them, thirteen years and a significant move later, but I still find one every couple of months.
I also found I was seriously allergic to them – if I inavertedly ate something they had gotten into, it would really disagree with me. And with things like Pasta you don’t always realise it’s infested unless you turn over the packaging very, very carefully. Which I learnt to do.
Hire a gold-dust gecko: they walk the ceilings out of reach of the cats, and are pretty good at catching nuisance bugs. Of course if you have to fumigate, track down the gecko…
Skip the tokay geckos: they’re mean suckers and bite.
Geckos are fine (they bark in the middle of the night, though, so be prepared), but once the weevils or whatever are inside the storage container, it’s a losing battle. Around here, rice only lasts about 6 months before it gets infested, no matter what you store it in. I’m not sure if the bugs hitchhike in on the rice, or if they make their way into the container. Either way, eeeewwww, not to mention having to throw away food grates me.
I keep meal moths at bay with glass jars for the oatmeal and malt-o-meal, bay leaves in the flour canister (works very satisfactorily, and easy enough to pick out of the flour sifter), and Safer Brand Pantry Pest Traps, available here at Ace Hardware. Simple little cardboard tent with glue inside, and a little pheromone-soaked cardboard chip to bait it. http://www.saferbrand.com/store/insect-control/B05140-2
I must admit that since living alone, where no one else sees the foodstuffs, and it takes me a LONG TIME to use some things up, I have gotten a little more relaxed about domestic wildlife. For meal moths, if you catch the infestation early, you can kill them before your stuff gets all webbed up and nasty by sticking the package in the freezer for a few days.
To control bugs, when it’s not too hot out, I leave the door open for the cactus wrens to come in the house. They are carnivorous, so they will eat any sort of bug, but they will also eat chips, crackers, bread, cheese, whatever they can reach, They have no problem figuring out how to open a bag of tortilla chips to get themselves a snack, so I have to keep the cupboard closed. They won’t eat seeds or rice like most birds do. There is one who lives at my house who will even land on my lap when I am having my morning coffee on the deck, and eat bread or chips out of my hand. She is totally a pest at times, knocking things over in the house, but I put up with her because she is really pretty cool! 🙂 She’s in the kitchen right now picking up some leftovers that the dogs didn’t eat.
What fun!
For reasonable amounts of flying insects I’ve had success with a carnivorous plant. It was a Venus Fly Trap, and it couldn’t cope with the relative cold and dryness of winter here in Sweden so it died on us, but recently ‘Fox suggested I should try the Sundew variety instead… and I’m going to, as soon as I find one.
I never realised how many flying insects we actually get (admittedly not an infestation, just barely to feed a plant) until the Venus Fly Trap died.
Geckos… I like the idea of using geckos for pest control. Won’t survive here, sadly, cat or no cat. Too cold.
Gotta second that suggestion of joining the folks who are trying to get a Trader Joe’s in Spokane. I live walking distance from one in Portland. Even less far to a Zupan’s. Mixed blessing, that: I get really lazy about making one big, economy-minded grocery trip every couple weeks or so and literally nickel and dime myself into penury by shopping every day. The reason: if I shop every day instead of once every couple weeks, that means 14 times the opportunities to succumb to impulse buying (like the previously-mentioned chocolates at the TJ’s checkout). I have the willpower of a beery fratboy, so you can imagine how that turns out. The upside is that I can blame being fat and broke on my conveniently-located apartment.
Followup: Trader Joe’s actually has a form for requesting a store! Go to http://www.traderjoes.com/location_requests_form.aspx , select the Location Requests from the drop down, and click the button.
And, (next message to prevent triggering the spam filter)…
There’s a Facebook page to promote the idea:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Trader-Joes-Spokane/180468480116
I submit, CJ, as a multiple Hugo award winner, you could significantly influence TJ’s.
Have I mentioned they sell 72% cocoa butter chocolate at (I think) around $3 for half a kilogram?! (1.1 lbs.)
I wish TJ would come to Hawaii, but there is very little chance of that. We even have trouble keeping the big box stores open in some places.
Anything offering that much chocolate that cheaply would be a store I do *not* wish in my neighbourhood. My nearest store is about 4.5 miles – it’s cyclable, but nothing I’d do every day. I would not feel guilty about buying a bar of chocolate there!