June 2012 Beeson Banner

 

 

31 May 2012

Pity I didn't look at the new fern before clicking "send" on the previous issue. Its distance from the fence is closer to six inches than to a yard.

 

 

1 June 2012

Cleaned receipts out of my wallet this morning; while Quickening them, I noticed that the Martin's receipt is divided into categories: all the pet foot together, the dairy foods together, etc. Makes it much easier to Quicken. *And* there is only information on the tape, you don't have to hunt for it among rubbish.

When I turned to the Marsh tape, I also realized: Martin's uses bold type and a fresh ribbon. Since the Martin's registers are brand new, I presume that they are using inkjet or laser. Ribbon isn't quite that dark unless it's carbon ribbon or is printing its very first page.

I happened to walk through the village during business hours a few days ago and checked out the new "Olive Branch", which sells olive oil and basalmic vinegar. Turns out that they also have a few envelopes of seasoning powders.

I just naturally expected that it would sell a variety of basalmic vinegars, and oils from a variety of different olives. Turns out that they sell two varieties of basalmic vinegar ("white" and "traditional"), but you can have thirty different flavorings in one or the other.

Though the olive oils are in similar case, they come from a variety of places -- none specified any finer than "California", and two specify only the continent. There are none that I'm confident are pure olive, but Athenolia sounds like the name of an oil, rather than a flavoring.

Wikepedia being handy, I looked up "barnea" and discovered that it's a shellfish. So I tried DuckDuckGo and found a list of olive oils, and sweet barnea *is* a variety of olive, grown only in Australia, and the oil has no discernable olive flavor. Athenolia is a "monovarietal made from Koroneiki olives."

Both lists being alphabetic, lets run down: Frantoio is real, as is Koroneiki. I could DuckDuck Leccino, Nocellara Del Belice, Manzanillo, Picuda HojiBlanco, and Picual but I don't think I'll bother.

I suspect that Almond, Avocado, Butter, Grapeseed, sesame seed, and walnut aren't olive at all.

The rest of the thirty are like those that I noticed in the store: chipotle, basil, lemon, etc.

The trouble with writing a rant is that when you go documenting stuff, you often weaken your case. But I confirmed my opinion with respect to the vinegars. On the other hand, I might buy a bottle of their only real basalmic vinegar, because I've never tasted the real thing.

Not at all sure what I'd do with it, since I don't eat salads.

Just checked Wikipedia: Olive Branch's basalmic vinegar is, at best, condimento grade. A serving of the real thing is one drop, and it's sold only in 100 ml bottles. At a price that suggests that they ought to allow it to be sold in teeny phials of the sort used for essential oils.

 

 

2 June 2012

I guess the stickum on the socks is only good for one wearing -- my sock not only slid down, I could *feel* it sliding down.

Got two nice big tomatoes today, and four smaller ones. Nothing of interest in the Center Street market. The herb vendor hasn't shown up at either market -- perhaps half a market isn't enough to make it worth her while to come. I saw no evidence that anyone but me attends both. It would be awkward to do so in a car.

Stopped at CVS and read the ingredients on their calcium tablets. They sounded a great deal like the Walgreen's ingredients, so I didn't buy any. There was an expensive brand I might want to buy a sample-size bottle of when I've reduced the number of bottles in the pantry.

 

 

4 June 2012

Dave finished cleaning off the gazebo pad Saturday. Now he's wondering what a gazebo pad is good for. I don't *think* we'll put a gazebo on it. Could be a good place to put lawn chairs, come the Fourth in June.

Evening: I just asked Dave whether he was still trying to delete his humongous file, and he said he was.

A while back he accidentally set one of his cameras to upload a picture to Comcast every two seconds, and the file was . . . fairly large . . . before he noticed days later. Ever since, he's been attempting to delete it and muttering that when he wants to delete a directory from TIS, he clicks "delete" and it's gone. After many failed efforts, he discovered that he can delete tiny nibbles of it, if he leaves the computer to work on it for five minutes per nibble.

I get the impression that Comcast would rather you didn't use the webspace they are always bragging about.

We took our first boat ride today, and Dave took some pictures for his Web site. He's hoping to boat more this summer than he did last year.

Washday. I took a shirt off Dave, and forgot to check the pocket -- the dollar bills came out fine, but a card ended up as fine flakes on everything. Shook off, mostly.

 

Filezilla is doing the trick! It still deletes only a bit at a time, and smaller bits, but it immediately deletes another bit without Dave having to highlight a screenfull of filespecs and click "delete", and it's deleting the bits much faster. Dave thinks it will be done by midnight. (Checks) At 11:19, there are less than two thousand files still to delete.

 

 

6 June 2012

I don't know whether it got the job done before midnight, but it had finished when I went to bed at half past.

Dave said he had tried Filezilla earlier, but it kept crashing, and he speculated that the file had been too big to handle before he nibbled at it,

Monday night the back fell off my typing chair; Dave poked around and found a broken bolt. Tuesday, Dave went to Ace and bought a replacement knob-headed bolt; now the chair works better than it did when new. Back always wobbled a bit; now it doesn't.

Washed Monday, rode to Aunt Millie's Tuesday. Not much else done.

On Sunday, I came back from church through the art festival, and bought an elephant ear for my lunch. I'd eaten about a year's ration of sugar before I realized that I could tip the ear and pour some of it off. The second half was much less gritty!

Elephant ears aren't quite the same thing as fried dough; when they stretch the dough, they make it the shape of a real elephant ear, and fan it in the grease before dropping it in so that it stays flat and doesn't bubble as much as fried dough.

It's a bigger serving, too. The customers ahead of me intended to split one. For some reason, they chose not to have it cut in half.

I took an extra cinnamon capsule when I got home.

 

 

7 June 2012

I should have stuck by my original plan to go bike riding today -- my back doesn't want me to stand or walk, and there isn't a lot I can do sitting or lying.

And my back always loosens up when I ride, because I keep the muscles moving without putting any strain on them.

I had to step out to keep up with Dave on our walk yesterday. When I commented on it, he said that he also stopped getting headaches and nausea when he quit using the hamburger cream. He's complaining about how slow his nose is to heal, but it's already gone from raw and bleeding to new skin with red blotches. "Still hurts."

Chickened out of riding to Aldi yesterday because I wanted to sew, but I didn't get much sewing done because I can't find the flatbed plate to the sewing machine. That isn't the sort of thing that can hide! After supper, I was thinking that my list was so long that I should use the car when I go to Aldi in the morning, when I realized that by car I could go right then. So I went, and spent over a hundred dollars, and still have most of a page of shopping list. The little sweet peppers appear to have had their season, so I bought a package of the big ones. Also got two packages of breakfast burritos, which pleased Dave very much. Breakfast burritos are oddly hard to find.