Amy’s Gripping Commentary

This week marked two years since I stopped eating meat. So, time for my annual tally!

In 733.71 days, you have saved:
0.2760 cows
60.599 chickens
0.6733 pigs
2.0199 turkeys
0.1615 ducks
114.46 fish

Total: 178.19 animals
Thank you

See what 178.19 animals looks like

And then there was this cute popup!

This comes from a veg*n calculator, and is discussed a bit here.

That two-thirds of a pig reminds me of an irritating ad insert in the paper the other day by some Indiana pork producers’ group. It said, roughly, Indiana Pork Feeds Every Hoosier, 5 Million People Around the World, and 15 Million Americans!

Sorry, folks, you don’t feed me. And there might be a few equally irritated Jews and Muslims in this state. Their website states the group “provides the pork needs for every man, woman, and child” in Indiana, which is better phrased since at least that allows as how I might not have any pork needs. I won’t bother giving them a link and increasing their traffic.

A fur-free Olympian has been a bit controversial, but I gotta say, she’s got the abs needed for her lines of work:

Thanks for allowing me to rant today! Back to my tofu.

More phone camera downloads.

Last week I rode around town a bit after work, ending up at the new Keep Indianapolis Beautiful green building. The three wind turbines (as seen in the shadows) were spinning wildly, making for an odd park bench experience. A guy on a bike asked me for a smoke, and I resisted the DQ across the street.

Harrison lounges at the vet. He’s no longer limping nor sneezing, and he was neutered last week! After a testicle location complication, all is now well and as soon as the hormones are gone I can try bonding him with Vegas. Or Arliss. Or how did I end up with so many white rabbits? Joey looks tiny now by comparison.

Pippen approves of fresh greens in reusable shopping bags.

David on a Tyvek mission. This was part of the porch prep–blowing all the paint dust created by the wire grinder with an air compressor. No official decision yet made on painting the pimple. My votes outnumber his, but he seems to think his voters are stronger. I didn’t think this was an electoral college, but I may be able to filibuster with strategic planting.

I am behind. A couple of weeks ago we went camping and caving at Mammoth Cave Nat’l Park with friends. Highlights: a challenging cave tour requiring helmets, headlights, kneepads, and a girth less than 42″ to fit through tight openings (the belly crawl through the Keyhole was messiest). Sleeping in a leaky tent in an all-night storm. A bird pooping on me while I napped in a chair. The Fire Masters mastering the fire…

David and I are thinking about going back in late fall to try another in-the-dirt tour. With a new dry tent.

Remember the other day, about two posts ago, when I mentioned we get a lot of packages shipped to our house and I felt guilty about all the packaging? This arrived that same day from Amazon:

You could have mailed adult humans in those boxes. And the lids to the gray storage containers arrived separately in another big box!

Check out the steamy action shot: David made a yummy tomato sauce the other day from tomatoes and basil in our backyard. Not enough are coming ripe currently so I supplemented today with tomatoes from the Farmers’ Market held in the park a block away.

No, we don’t have cabinet doors yet.

Recycling may not be the most efficient use of our resources (compared to reducing and reusing), but it beats landfilling the unusable “trash” you don’t want. In the last several months I’ve gone from curbside recycling of #1-2 plastics, aluminum, and glass (and newspaper in the litterboxes), to these items plus junk mail, plastic bags/case wrap, cardboard, paperboard, styrofoam, packing peanuts, phonebooks, and #3-7 plastics. All in a city with a crummy recycling program.

This is one of my visits to Indianapolis Recycled Fiber, where dumpsters and bins accept all those weird things your curbside recycler won’t. Except molded styrofoam, which I’m still saving to make it worth a trip to the place in town that will take it. Anyway, IRF takes odd things like phonebooks (no, you can’t recycle them with newspaper or junk mail) and plastics through #7, plus they are on my way home from work. Indy now has added drop-off points for cardboard and paperboard to some of the plastic/glass/aluminum/newspaper spots, one of which is two miles from home. I take packing peanuts to the UPS Store and plastic bags and case wrap go to Kroger, both of which are on the way to the city dropoff. Convenient dropoff on the way to other errands is important to me because we have a small house with no shed/garage space available for recycling collection, so I need to unload the recyclables frequently lest they take over the front porch or annoy my S.O. too much. (He has begun bringing home quantities of cardboard and plastics from jobs at clients’ homes, though I did not ask him to do so!)

In the reuse category, American consumerism made me collect all this crap over the years that ended up in my garage when I moved (this is less than half the pile), and so I committed to finding new homes for all of it. I have used Freecycle a lot in the past, but for mass quantities (and the annoyances Freecycling can bring) nothing beats a well-attended yard sale.

My mom came down this weekend and though I don’t think it was her original intent to help me sell my crap, she did help and it was a reasonably fun productive day in the hot sun (and a shade canopy!) with another friend selling her stuff. My friend had a lot less and is about to move to another country, so she had a better reason to be getting rid of everything! I made a decent amount of money at the community sale, which was held at a church and collected a booth fee which was matched and donated to charity. At the end I declared everything free and had to take very little back with me (for which I will still find a home). I had brought three full vehicles–SUV, minivan, and full-sized pickup!

Reduction: I fight the battle against collecting stuff every time I go to the store. I have been better in recent years about not buying things I don’t need, but I’m not immune to it. Living in a smaller house with very little storage forces the issue more acutely for me, and in the end I save money too. Now I need to focus on buying items with less packaging, and collecting all the recycling on the porch is making me aware of the packaging quantities, which is starting to guilt me into doing a better job during the purchase phase. There’s still the dilemma: having items shipped to our home is theoretically better for the environment than driving to the store to get it (and probably reduces impulse purchasing too), but now we have all these boxes. I wish I could find someone who wanted them!

Most comprehensive list of where to recycle anything in Indianapolis is maintained by Keep Indianapolis Beautiful

I have been involved in “discussions” (once the name-calling comes in, are they arguments?) in a local message forum for IndyGasPrices.com, where I am generally the lone liberal and suffer for it. I have to work hard at being nice and also at not responding to everything, because it gets old and I have better things to do, and I just don’t need to stress about these people’s ideas. But seriously, the place is an echo chamber of ridiculous statements on poverty, homelessness, the environment, global warming, and of course the solutions to high gas prices (I’ll save you the trouble: it’s all the Democrats’ and environmentalists’ faults, and poor people are lazy leeches on society). I know they feel the same disgust at what I say, but it makes me sad that there are so many cranky, uncaring, thoughtless Hoosiers. It’s just the loudest ones that make it seem that everyone is like that, but that’s one of the reasons I try to maintain a presence: so everyone else doesn’t think ALL Hoosiers have those opinions.

At least all the discussions have prompted me to do some more reading (and I’m sure my sources are too liberally biased to be worthwhile, if you ask them), including my library checkout of The Working Poor, a rather long Wikipedia article on Hugo Chavez, and today I was trying to find information on why apparently 80% of leased oil exploration areas don’t actually get explored (i.e., why do we need more drilling areas opened anyway?). I found this article from January on an Alaskan area threatened by a proposed oil and gas field, focusing on polar bear habitat and generally being way too liberal for the folks I mentioned previously. But the article ends with

“We can live without petroleum, but we cannot live without the whale,” said George Edwardson, Inupiaq subsistence hunter.

That profoundly captures exactly how I feel. Of course that subsistence hunter can’t live without the whale and can totally avoid oil, but I’d say our planet and its population have the same basic needs. We’ve built this petroleum energy economy that threatens our very existence by shortages, political wars, unsustainable practices, and terrorism, and yet we blindly push for moremoremore of the addiction, never considering conservation or alternative energy seriously until, oops, I can’t afford to fill my SUV. It’s someone’s fault! Get me my American-guaranteed cheap gas! Those third world people are using too much oil! (The U.S. still consumes a QUARTER of the world’s energy but has 5% of the world’s population.) If we’d just get back to the basics, where we respect nature instead of pillage it, where we help the hungry instead of fertilizing and factory farming our way into Western obesity and soil depletion and water contamination, and where we stop thinking the planet is ours to trash, maybe we’d actually get somewhere.

I was just going to share a couple of reviews with you but then some really random material came along for the ride.

EcoSelect 100% Biodegradable Dryer Sheets: I found these at WalMart, of all places, a couple of months ago. They are made with a vegetable derived softening agent. They aren’t tested on animals and they totally degrade (buried in soil) in 21 days. So, I figured I’d give ‘em a try.

They’re great! The texture of the sheet seems a bit odd, but my laundry behaves the same as it did with Bounce and I feel much better about this product. But, alas, I can’t find it anymore. I tried to find it online and only saw a few notes from other people who can’t find these dryer sheets either. Let me know if you see them, or tell me about a substitute!

Tossed is a new-to-here franchise that has, well, salads. I picked up dinner last night and was impressed that they made the whole wheat crepe right in front of me from batter, though he messed up one of them and had to start over and it took a long time. David liked his crepe with roasted chicken, portobellos, roasted onions, spinach, and balsamic vinaigrette, though mine with tofu, carrots, sugar snap peas, shiitakes, romaine, and honey sesame dressing was just kind of eh. It may be NYC’s best salad, but it was just kinda plain to me. The crepe itself was the best part and reminded us of Ethiopian injera bread. I guess I’m not much of a salad person, but if you are, try Tossed in Fishers. You can put together your preferred ingredients in salad/sandwich/crepe, or choose one of their combination ideas.

So, the doorknobs:

Note the product placement, PQ.

Nicole and I meet regularly to exchange odd items. They make total sense to us, but most people probably don’t save their Wall Street Journals for their friend’s litterboxes, trade coupons, collect and pass on #5 plastic recyclables, or order detergent and hay for each other. This time I was surprised to get a bag of doorknobs (along with the books and detergent); Nicole had replaced all the knobs in her house and I was to give them to David to use in his remodeling jobs. (Never fear, if he can’t use them, I will donate them to Habitat for Humanity’s Indianapolis HomeStore where they resell them and use the funds to help build houses.) Here I thought I had brought the weirdest item, named The Quiet Check Valve which David had sourced for her sump pump, but then it was all topped by her rented fish in the front seat. I guess it eats a particular aquarium pest and once it eats all yours, you return the fish to the pet store to be sold to someone else who has this unique stuff that causes tank problems.

In other news, I spilled an entire glass of red wine in my keyboard last night, but it seems to be working fine at the moment. Also, David looked up an ex-girlfriend online, described as “90210 pretty,” and discovered she works for World Wrestling Entertainment (you know, as in SmackDown). And Nicole picked up a disease in Puerto Rico last week, so I hope she didn’t touch the doorknobs.

ETA: This morning my spacebar and enter keys have stopped working in their alcoholic stickiness.

Also tonight, I was all warm and fuzzy at seeing goose parents leading their juveniles across the Menards parking lot. There was another adult with about five fuzzy gray followers behind this batch.

If you notice the motorcycle in my mirror, you’ll see some punk guy who thought it was hilarious to zoom at them and rev his engine. His buddy on another excuse for a small penis also found this to be a great activity. I’ve never been so close to yelling DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE out my car window. The adult geese stayed with the juveniles who could not fly yet. The 15 seconds summed up how I feel most days: Aww, animals are awesome, and there’s no hope for humanity.

No fried chicken for vegetarians, right? Well, after craving some for awhile, I finally made the Al Gore challenge recipe, but I did it in an electric skillet like my parents always used. It seems slightly healthier than dunking the chik’n in a vat of oil (and easier to clean up too).

Coating the chik’n (I added some paprika to the recipe and reduced the nutritional yeast)

Frying, mmm. For those who were confused, this is FAKE chicken!

Not sure if this qualifies as a healthy meal, but it could have been a lot worse!

David actually liked it, and he’s a pretty harsh critic when anyone cooks. I think I’ll brown the chik’n a bit crispier next time and maybe tone down the batter, since it was more seasoned than I used to eat. But it was still good! The basic concept should apply well to my family’s chicken tenders recipe, too. And I’m going to try beef burgundy soon!

If I haven’t mentioned it, one of the best inventions ever is the rice cooker. I rank it pretty close to the top, which includes the internet, tampons, and pay at the pump.

Speaking of the pump, Dawn asked in the bike commuting comments about the emissions and money saved by my recent biking. The calculators I’ve found online assume a gasoline-powered vehicle, and I don’t know how much worse my diesel vehicle spews, but the basics for the 50ish miles I biked last week (instead of driving, not “extra” miles at the gym) led to about 2000 calories burned, 50 pounds of toxic emissions not spewed (25 lbs CO2), and about $5.50 saved in fuel. No, not drastic numbers (I do have a very fuel efficient vehicle and that savings is not what spawned this), but I feel healthier already. I hope the planet does too. I liked the bumper sticker I saw today: Live like you live here. Much more positive than this other one I saw (I think that’s a gas pump handle):

ETA: For the 50 miles vs. my SUV, which I really only drive to haul stuff but did bring to work today so David could use the Jetta for errands which required a lot more driving, I would save $11 in gasoline and 58 lbs of CO2 in the atmosphere. And David’s truck would have used $18 in gas and spewed 94 lbs CO2. Amazing how much difference there is from one vehicle to another!

A couple of biking calculators: Bike Geek, 511.org

I rode about 50 miles to and from work on my bike in the last week since I started this little commuting project. Observed:

One catcall and one general holler
Two cheery guys with booze in paper sacks
One muskrat
No crashes (did almost fall off this morning and saw one person fall over with a clip incident)
Four trips before I even noticed a McDonald’s along the way
One chunk of broken TV on the giant bridge
Two wrong turns
Felt short in my compact car after riding so much perched on the bike
No near death experiences
Zero flats, hooray
Twenty-plus pounds of gear in my backpack!

Without my laptop, the backpack isn’t that heavy. Well, I guess it still is, but not so painful. I leave a lot of shower and clothing items in the locker room at work, but I do tend to overpack no matter how I’m traveling. I discovered the way in is 150 ft negative elevation change over the whole route, which means riding home is really hard work to recover that (not to mention the up and down of the bridge both ways right by work). That isn’t a huge change in elevation, but when you suddenly weigh 180 lbs with all that stuff on your back, you have knobby tires, and there’s a headwind, it can take almost an hour to go seven miles! I am ready to get a rack and/or panniers to help with the load. I can probably leave the heavy U-lock behind because no one is going to cut a cable lock at my security-controlled workplace populated with upstanding people. I hope to get a new cross strap for my Timbuk2 bag and just carry it messenger style like it was designed, instead of inside the backpack. I must learn to part with more things.

For Bike to Work Day this morning, almost thirty of us left from a bike shop in Irvington to ride together downtown. I was riding just behind the people in the video in the local paper’s sidebar coverage. Riders from 11 points in the city met at the circle for breakfast, press conferences, free bike parking… pretty much all of which I missed because our eastside group arrived late at the circle, and my coworkers were leaving together for our plantsites then.

The ride in: Michigan Street

Waiting forever for a train

It was a nice mix of people: racers on road bikes in team spandex, random people like me on mountain bikes, and regular joes in jeans on cruisers. I don’t think those groups mix a lot otherwise, but the point was to highlight bike commuting and riding in a group provides safety and camaraderie, even when you don’t know anyone else.

I liked this shot of my coworkers converging at corporate headquarters for a group picture (which I don’t have). I noticed a lot of them are carrying backpacks too so maybe we just need a lot of stuff at our jobs!

It was a gorgeous day today and I spent more time on the bike trail for scenery, but the ride home still hurt with all that crap on my back.

Today, our company organized multiple beautification projects around the city with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful as part of a global day of service. I helped paint an urban wall with a colorful mural. I found software on my computer that stitched three separate photos pretty well! Our department mostly painted from the tuba player to the violin player.

I’m the dork in the white shirt.

Other employees worked on other wall murals, planted trees and flowers, cleared brush, walked to raise money for MDR-TB programs, and built Habitat homes around the city, while employees around the world at our other sites participated in their own local projects. The Indy group was listed at eight to nine thousand people participating! There was some attempt at a world record too, I think for largest paint-by-number.

I biked to the mural site and passed several other groups of volunteers. When I biked home, I found miles of brush piles and trash cleaned up from Pleasant Run Stream. They even managed to keep it out of the road and bike trail, and the city crews were already working on mulching the brush.

It was nice to be out of the office for the morning (though I had to stay late the night before and skip lunches to catch up) and help our community. I love urban murals, and I never realized how much I’d benefit from the clean up, but I bike along that stream all the time!

I feel like I’ve been surrounded by a lot of negative people lately, and combined with my general worries about life/politics/planet, it can drag me down. I’m trying hard to be positive and not feed into that undercurrent of crankiness. Getting out with a paintbrush helps sometimes.

Today my hippie leanings came closer to full circle when I commuted to work on my bicycle. I thought about it a week or so ago when the cycling club at work was trying to attract interest in a charity ride and Bike to Work Day, which is next Friday the 16th. I figured it sounded like a good idea, what with my wish to lose the perpetual five extra pounds, my tree hugging (spewing fewer diesel fumes daily has to be a good idea, no matter how efficient my fuel mileage may be), and what the heck, why not set an example for other drivers who are feeling the fuel price pinch? It hasn’t hurt me yet, but I might need this backup transportation someday. Also I saw what I guess was a muskrat, which has to be a good sign for the day. Or something.

I happen to live at one end of an underused greenway (and parkway) that follows a meandering creek. The greenway and parkway are inefficient for cars with all the creek-following, but it makes for a pretty ride and the lack of cars is great for biking on the road. One does risk serious corporeal damage on the divided highway that makes up the rest of the route after the greenway ends (if Indianapolis would just finish the planned greenways I’d have one all the way to work, but I’m not holding my breath on that one), so on the advice of another bike commuter who has taken this route for years (and who was hit by a car last month), I just took the sidewalk in that area. The highway goes to the city dumps, industrial areas, and the airport, and there is so much debris-dropping large truck traffic that it’s the one area I’m uncomfortable taking the pavement. No one was on the sidewalks so it all worked out. Hey Indy, how about some bike lanes on Raymond?

I waited for a few lights and had to navigate security gates at work, but other than that it was a direct route of about seven miles. I predicted the one rude/dangerous thing a car did, turning in front of me with no signal, and I didn’t need my pepper spray for any dogs or thugs, so I’d say it was a success. I was in the showers at work within 45 minutes of leaving home.

Of course now I’m thinking of all the doodads I would like to buy for my bike, a Gary Fisher I purchased several years ago but I haven’t mountain biked in the last few years. I’ll probably go for Kevlar-belted commuter tires rather than the knobby ones I currently have, panniers to replace my backpack, and I need to finally learn how to change a flat. I had all the stuff to do it but now the tire levers are missing and I never have had a flat for practical experience. Would my roadside assistance come? They say as long as I have my cell phone I can be in any vehicle…

Bike to Work Day (and bike month) is observed all over the country. Indy has events planned for next Friday. Will I see any of you on Monument Circle for breakfast in spandex?

Michiana readers: your bike to work week is June 2-6 because you are pussies about May weather.

The weekend was so busy it is taking multiple posts! The rant ahead didn’t lend to brevity. The picture uploading is mostly working now with the new blog software, but apparently it only uploads square pictures, so some have been cropped without my intent to do that. I thought it was just a thumbnail thing and then the uploading broke completely again, so who knows.

I went to Earth Day Saturday afternoon, by myself because everyone else pooped out. I had a nice time in the lovely sunny weather (in my Eat Like You Give A Damn shirt) and discovered some interesting tidbits, like that all of Indy’s residential waste is actually incinerated to create steam energy, and in fact my employer is one of the largest customers of that energy. I also learned about an upcoming green building conference in town and I asked the Walmart guy who was giving out free reusable shopping bags made from old soda bottles why the cashiers at Walmart were so confused about bagging items in these very same reusable totes. I had great Indian food and watched all the kids hula-hooping on the grass.

My internal barometer was running from excited to depressed to hopeful to discouraged as I thought of all the ways the human race has messed up the planet and how all the problems of war and hunger and diseases of affluence and environment and animal welfare and social justice and energy crises are so intertwined with our cultures and lifestyles that it’s hopeless to try to make it better… but what else are you going to do? I want to be a person who tries to make it better, by making less waste myself and saving animals’ lives before they are put down like so much trash in the landfill, by speaking up when fellow members of local message boards say all panhandlers are faking it and lazy and that homelessness is the homeless person’s fault and that they should deal with it themselves. Not the kind of person who mindlessly consumes, assuming it’s the American Dream because TV tells me so, and I’ve never gone hungry so anyone who is must be doing something wrong. If you don’t have hope that something better can happen, is there a reason to live? That whole butterfly-flapping-causing-hurricanes thing has to play out somewhere, so it may as well be my wings and hopefully the wings of a few other hopeful people who recognize the disastrous, unsustainable, unjust course our nation and world seem to be following.

Was that dramatic and sobering enough? I had to do fun doggie things to make up for all the soul searching. Meanwhile I accepted a rabbit back into rescue from a woman who had told us allergies developed in the family. When she and her sons brought Miesa back to us, the nine-year-old volunteered, “You know why we’re returning him, right? Because he ate my mom’s laptop cord.” Ah, the honesty of kids. As if that weren’t enough to make me wonder if it’s ever possible to screen adopters enough, they had been feeding him not only the CRAPPIEST food you can buy, but it was GUINEA PIG food. They’re darn lucky it was not the other way around because if you feed a guinea pig rabbit food, it’ll DIE of scurvy.

On to doggies, because I’d had about enough of people at that point.

Here we are at Mutt Strut, a fundraiser for the Humane Society of Indianapolis. Despite my concerns with this organization, I decided to attend this year again. There’s something about a lot of pet lovers coming together to celebrate happy relationships with their animals while raising money for an org that does indeed find homes for homeless pets that made me want to participate. People go to this event because it’s fun, and that’s what we needed. And people need to see that they aren’t crazy for loving their pets–lots of other people do too. Thousands, in fact, judged by this event’s attendance.

BTW, this is part of the crash wall at the track. It doesn’t seem to be in very good shape!

Poor Casper’s tootsies didn’t hold up too well on the coarse Indianapolis Motor Speedway track, but a stop at one of the vet stations wrapped her sore feet and two little boys tried to give her water from their hands. It was very cute. Casper wanted to sleep in the shade, not finish the 2.5 mile racetrack walk!

We had two happy, tired dogs at the end. Casper’s feet didn’t bother her at all that night so all is well. And I finally saw another white collie! This one, Oreo, is about Casper’s age and was adopted from the Humane Society.

This is supposed to be a post about Mutt Strut and Earth Day and other fun weekend things, but the blog software upgrade has stumped me on uploading pictures, so you’ll just have to wait.

I did find a link to a picture taken of us yesterday.

Perhaps as a holdover from childhood, I like pudding cups. But I can’t find them in the store! They’re great at work (keeps me from going to the vending machine), but the big stores don’t keep them with the baking/boxed pudding (baking aisle), and for all my wandering efforts and employee inquiries, where the heck are the single serve pudding cups? I buy them now and then but once again, I can’t find them!

I know I should move to a friendlier package, maybe make my own. I’m afraid I’d eat a whole batch at once. Maybe I should bring single serves of the tofu choc mousse Nicole and I have made before?

Busy weekend coming up: helping at a regatta in the morning, then Earth Day downtown in the afternoon tomorrow, and Mutt Strut on Sunday! I need to fit in some yardwork too.

Where’s the pudding?

The mission: Use no plastic shopping bags. It’s been almost a year and I’m pretty successful.
The scene: Major supermart everyone hates for worker mistreatment and imported crap. (What can I say, I’m cheap and like one-stop shopping.)
The item: Box of tampons.

My cashier was scanning the items in my order and putting them in my cloth shopping bag, emblazoned with a competitor’s logo. (I prefer to bag things myself but he grabbed it from me.) When the bag was mostly full, he put an item in a plastic shopping bag. Before, while, and after he was doing this I asked him not to. I did NOT want a plastic shopping bag. (Okay, I sound weird. But I mean it.) There was room in the bag.

He insisted and put the plastic shopping bag containing the item in my reusable bag. I took it out and took the item out: a box of tampons. He explained There’s poison in that. Excuse me? Do you know what I plan to do with these? I said they were all cotton. (The box says cotton/rayon, but I don’t think that qualifies as poison.) Does this guy have some sort of Oedipal complex? Does he have stock in the Diva Cup? Is it like that thing my mom has about no food in the bathroom?

I can only hope he mistook the box for a pesticide or something, and yes, he’s probably trained not to put that in the same bag as the fruit and veggies. But I would have tossed it in there anyway, and I was annoyed that he wouldn’t listen to me.

Don’t worry, I put the bag back on the rack so someone else can use it. And I let the tampons comingle with my apples!

Meanwhile, I was looking at old photos for one to recreate for the Mymsie-alerted site Young Me/Now Me. I did not find the pic I remember in my History Is Fun shirt, but I did come across these promised gems:

Matt in his homemade boombox costume (see these comments)

My evidence of a high score on Pitfall to send to some magazine. I put my guinea pig Frisky in the scene to make it better. For the life of me, I cannot find the blog discussion about this… anyone know who was talking about it a few months ago?

In high school, our friend Stacy created a newsletter about herself called Stuff That Has Happened to Stacy. It was actually quite advanced given the limitations of early-90s graphic design software and her issues that arrived after graduation continued to make me laugh. It was a lot like an entertaining blog, come to think of it. (Goes out searching for Stacy on Google…no, I don’t think she’s a track star…duh, look in the alumni database. Will get to that later.) Anyway, for lack of a better subject here (Camera Phone Post 3?) and yes, I know it’s not as entertaining, Stuff That Has Happened to Amy:

No Dogs in the Bed! Well, Walt gets up there when I get up for work, but I have strict demands that the blankets are up so I don’t have dog hair in my sheets. And even Casper put her paws on the bed last week to see when I’d get up. That’s really bizarre for her!


People with Big Noggins. Hey, I don’t care how big your head is. Just don’t perch a regular-sized hat on top, even if it is your favorite team!

Don’t Offer Me a Salad. (That might become my header mantra at some point.) For all of you who wonder what the heck I eat, I give you a typical lunch at least a couple of times per week at one of the cafeterias at work. This is today’s fresh saute of mushrooms, spinach, red/yellow/green bell peppers, bok choy, diced tomatoes, onions, carrot shreds, and broccoli in a rose sauce on penne pasta (and of course with garlic!). Then I threw a few chow mein noodles on top. The cafeteria advertised this as a sausage jambalaya, but hold the sausage and I’m thrilled, I’m full, I have eaten lots of pretty-colored veggies that are very good for me, and I saved a buck over everyone who had it with meat! The sauces are different every day and I can usually eat for less than $4. Note my bottle of Crystal Light, cuz I believe in me.

At Least the Editor Tried. At Kohl’s yesterday (David claims he hates all their stuff but he asked to go there. He asked me to read what was on his exterior jeans label, pulled two pair off the shelf that matched his label, and bought them. I hate him), I found this note taped to a rolling cart. What I find hilarious is that someone (NOT ME) tried to fix the grammar mistakes, but still missed some. It’s not just me, I swear! I resisted the urge to correct the rest (mostly because I lacked a pen), but I did turn a polo collar back down on a child mannequin because I think that collar-up-layered-polo nonsense is just STUPID.


>Are you finished? >Just Wait ‘Til I Get Going! Where Was I? (name the movie)

Cult, anyone? Yesterday after dining at Three Sisters, we stopped at Good Earth next door because I knew they carried Birkenstocks and I’m on a mission for comfortable shoes. This place is a natural foods store, crammed with all the goofy stuff I can’t find at Meijer, and upstairs (among the bulk herbs and books on cleansing your bowels) is a selection of Birks, Earth Shoes, etc. And there is a middle-aged guy who sells them to you in a rather goofy way. At one point some people in the essential oil room burst into rousing song, after random people offered their opinions on my feet. Everyone seemed to know each other a little too well, and later we relayed our odd shoe store experience in a generic way to a friend who said Oh, Good Earth? That guy is weird. Anyway, I tried on lots of shoes, and decided I really like Earth Shoes but not exactly the ones they had there (I bought some online instead), while David was reading about how to mend himself in the forest with the plants around him. The goofy guy pretty much forced David to take off his Birks to repair the edges, which have been beaten to hell over the years. This caused us to wait even longer and not be able to go to another store which closed in the meantime, but I thought the picture was funny.

And that was one of several ridiculous parking stops between the cafe and the grocery, where I did buy bulgur and dishwasher rinse that was not tested on animals.

Gassy Ass. I saw this on a car at the Post Office. I suppose it’s like my Mend Your Fuelish Ways bumper sticker, but mine’s way classier. And not a ribbon.