A Real Post

Yesterday was foo filled at work and when I went home for lunch it was foo filled on the TV news too. But it was good to sit in the recliner with cats.

I went home because there were two packages to pick up at the apartment office. One was something called Wax Vac which was advertised to be a safe way to melt ear wax instead of swabbing it out, and I was hoping to use it to avoid a doctor's appointment to unclog my left ear. But the instructions for the device say it is only for grabbing the wax that's close to the surface, and even then they suggest using a softener first, and say to see a doctor for anything like what I have.

The other item was a major WTF non-delivery, a $10 earbud set which definitely did not have to be sent "signature required".

I didn't really eat lunch, I think I had a pickle and a couple of pieces of chocolate. I was feeling very depressed.

Back at work things didn't get better till about 5 pm, but it will be Monday before we get a fix for the main foo.

After work was dreaded holiday season shopping. I don't do holiday shopping, I don't believe in buying presents just because the Jesus culture says it's required. I was raised by Orthodox Jews, I am allergic to anything related to the elevation of a human to deity status. Even when I did believe in the concept of a Messiah, I didn't believe he was entitled to a do-over. The Bible says he'll bring universal peace. Jesus didn't achieve that while he was alive, or in the 1,000 years his apologists gave him. Even now that I have no faith of any kind, I'm still allergic to this holiday, and elevating the minor mythological holidays of Chanukah and Kwanzaa to the same status is not helping.

But I digress.

First stop was Petco, where I was accosted by row upon row of pet toys in pagan holiday colors of green and red. I had to wait for a pair of chatty employees to finish stocking the canned food who totally blocked the non-denominational cat toy aisle. Found three items which I thought soon-to-be-renamed Milo might enjoy.

Looked at my phone's groc list, I needed celery and bananas, and Safeway app said pasta and Klondike bars were on sale. So, Safeway, got those items plus onion dip for the celery and margarine, which was on sale and I only have one stick left in the freezer. Looked for light whipped cream, but they have changed all their cans to a holiday theme and they all say "made with real cream" which does not strike me as "light". Domino does not like the one I got a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I need to try Lucky's.

Driving back home, I was in the left lane when I passed the produce store, so I took the next U-turn and popped inside to get a few cans of what is now my favorite stuffed grape leaves brand:

I wish they made them with ground lamb instead of only vegetarian, but these are pretty good, bite sized and in a delicious minty sauce.

Home, dinner was a lamb shank and half a can of the dolmathes pictured above. Klondike bars for dessert.

Pet toys had been tossed into the middle of the livingroom, and the big surprise is Milo is not at all interested in the two round objects. He loves the burlap bag of catnip, which was no surprise seeing as how much he loves the catnip banana.

I was still very depressed by the news and the Facebook reaction to it. Tried to take my mind off it by watching the Tivo - all I had on there was the 12-12 concert for Sandy, and I mostly FFed past a screaming Alicia Keyes, and an aging The Who, but listened to most of Billy Joel's very long set which did some clever and artful things with NYC vignettes and gave each of his band members (all of them half his age) some time in the spotlight. They were very good, and were enjoying being part of an epic performance. FFed past the gratuitous wanna-be personalities interviewing New Yawkers for no apparent reason, lookin forward to the Nirvana set with Sir Paul, but Tivo had decided the program ended before that, so I was back to being depressed.

Went to the PC for more FB angst, when I got back to the livingroom, the cats were both on the recliner, a major milestone, so I grabbed the camera and took some photos. Less depressed after that.

Went to bed early, but couldn't sleep. Played with the internet radio to see what the Beeb was saying about the foo in CT, but all their broadcasts were in fru-fru mode: an interview with a doctor doing research on blood oxygen levels, something about winter gardening, a recording which said BBC World Service was off the air and would return at some time GMT. I could not find their Thai broadcast.

Fell asleep somewhere around midnight. 4 am the cats are fighting. Or more accurately, yelling at each other. Milo has started to meow when he's miffed. 7:30 am feels like 5 am, Milo curls up next to me, his head on my arm, purring like an Evinrude.  

A Controversial Word Or Twelve

FB is rife with "access to mental health care is hard, access to guns is easy" postings. This is true. But it isn't applicable to the events in CT or Columbine or most of the other mass killings we've seen on the news.

Here's why:

Most of these people are not recognizable as mentally ill until after they have snapped. 

Most people who are mentally ill don't see themselves as such, it's one of the traits of mental illness to think you are the sane one in an insane world. And the world is insane. It always has been.

The Soviet Union, China, North Korea and other repressive regimes routinely lock up dissidents as insane.

Access to mental health care has been improving in the US. For the past 15 years or so, every health plan I have been on includes a mental health hotline, and free counseling - anonymous if you want it to be. At least three of my friends staff mental health emergency hotlines.

Having hotlines and counseling and support groups has not prevented a rash of suicides-by-train in the past three years in Palo Alto. Higher fences and police guards at the crossings has helped, but the police don't get it that you have to have that guard there all the hours the trains run, and you can't pull them out just because the problem seems to have gone away.

We need more and better access to health care of every kind, but IMHO that's not going to prevent these tragedies.

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Guns. This is what killed most of those CT children:

http://www.academy.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10151_10051_479361_-1

Bushmaster .233 Remington O.R.C.® Semiautomatic Rifle

Price: $899.99

Enjoy great performance from the Bushmaster .233 Remington O.R.C.® Semiautomatic Rifle that features a 30-round magazine. The 6-position, telescoping stock adapts to your needs and collapses for hassle-free carrying. The bore and chamber are chrome lined to provide accuracy, durability and easy maintenance, and the locking hard case ensures safe storage and portability.

Features and Benefits

• Semiautomatic action with a 30-round magazine capacity
• M4 profile barrel with an A2 bird cage suppressor
• 6-position, telescoping stock adapts to your needs and collapses for convenient carrying
• Bore and chamber are chrome lined to provide accuracy, durability and easy maintenance
• Receiver-length Picatinny optics rail with two 1/2" optics risers
• Heavy oval M4 type handguards
• Milled gas block

Not a weapon which should be legal, IMHO. This is a military grade machine gun which can be disassembled to fit into knapsack.

It is time to amend the Constitution to remove the 2nd amendment. The maintenance of a well-regulated militia has nothing to do anymore with private citizens owning guns. And by the way, the right is to bear arms, not to own guns per se. Swords, lances, pikes and knives are also arms.

And an aside. I enjoy shooting guns. When I expressed an interest in them as a pre-teen, my parents enrolled me in the Seattle Police Athletic League's youth rifle program. I earned every medal they gave for sharpshooting with a .22 cal rifle on a 50-foot range. I once won a turkey shoot at a Boeing family event. About 10 years ago the NRA offered a handgun safety course, which I took and passed and also passed the test and hold a CA certificate to own a handgun. From time to time I go to the local indoor range, rent a handgun and put holes in pieces of paper. I'm pretty good at putting 5 holes into the space of 3.

But I have never owned a firearm and never want to.

Mostly because accidents happen, and partly because burglars look for guns even before they look for valuables. But also because I'd rather have someone else clean and maintain them, and keep them locked up.

Back to Normal

Not depressed anymore. Not too thrilled that all the news channels have forgotten that there is news in places other than Sandy Hook, CT. I really don't need or want to see next-day interviews with any of the victims' family members, or clergy or shrinks. In a week or two, I do want to hear what law enforcement has pieced together as a coherent theory of what led to the crazy guy's acting out his delusions.

To me, the tragedy is just one more proof that there are no gods, nothing supernatural is watching over us, and  things do not "happen for a reason".

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There was a good football game on the tube, Nevada vs Arizona. A wonderful high-scoring game with almost no defensive plays, with less than 2 minutes to go, Nevada was ahead 48-35 and the announcers were doing their usual going overboard singing the praises of the Nevada coach and how he has beaten a ranked team in a higher division. As they were pontificating, Arizona scored twice and won by 1 point.  

My traditional lunch for a college football game is hot dogs. A while ago I was all out of buns and almost out of hot dogs, and Costco had both deeply discounted, but you had to buy a wagonload. I had divided up the buns into packs of 4 until I ran out of zip-locks and threw the remaining dozen into the freezer with them. When I opened the freezer to get a couple of buns I saw there were far too many left, taking up valuable ice cream space, so I pulled out that dozen bag (plus two for lunch) and grabbed the Fannie Farmer cookbook and found a recipe for bread pudding. It needed some tweaking, but I had all the ingredients, once I realized there was an unopened carton of "best of the egg" in the fridge "best used by 9 November 2012".

( recipe and such beneath the cut )

Cut yourself a piece of pudding, add a dollop of hard sauce and let it melt. A short shot of microwaves can be used to encourage this.

Serves about 12.

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While the pudding was baking, Milo disappeared. I could not find him anywhere. Domino was on the top level of the cat tree, a place I have never seen her go before. Hmmmm. How does one lose a 16-lb cat indoors?

Speaking of lost, the other day I reported that I could not find my Polaroid tripod. I found it, it was in the bedroom closet under my scuba gear bag, which had fallen over behind the shirt rack. There was also a monopod which has small tripod legs which can extend. Now all I need is a remote.

Found Milo in the bedroom sleeping among my T-shirts. Two black ones were at the top of the stacks, and his dark fur blended right in.


The bread pudding was marvelous, the hard sauce was very hard in the alcoholic sense, but melted at room temp FTW.  I ate three slices, almost decided to have half the pan as dinner.

It took me so long to write this, dinner will be very late. ;-)

The pudding project derailed my plans to go see a movie, but so did the football game and a lot of online "research".  No way am I going to the cinema on a Saturday night with several blockbusters in their first weekend. Maybe tomorrow. I may go to Cheetah's.

Plans for tomorrow:

Football
Massage maybe
Janice at 2:30 to give her a calendar and a key, but that's just for an hour, probably
Movie maybe