B. Durbin @225: Aw, darn. And here I was picturing someone sitting and enhancing daguerrotypes with the aid of a Babbage Numerator...
No, I have no idea how that'd work, but the polished wood and brass fittings, and the inevitable black curtain draped over the back, are lovely to contemplate!
Nightsky @157: Whatever they use in the "Sesame Vegan Chicken" at the Chinese restaurant down the road with the extensive vegetarian menu is even MORE convincing than the Quorn Naked Cutlets. I am told it can be ordered from a place called May Wah, but I haven't done this yet. My friends who do have an auxiliary freezer.
Feorag, CSEdwards: thank you for the recommendations! In addition to the Penzey's in the town center, there's an independent supermarket on the north side of town with a strong kosher-foods focus, and I'll check there for pareve chicken flavor base.
Magenta Griffith @98: There's a Penzey's in the center of town, actually. But it's not just a veggie soup base I want; it's the uncanny vegetarian simulation of chicken broth that Horizon Organics' No-Chicken Broth provides, and that nothing else yet has managed. It's THE perfect solution, along with Quorn Naked Cutlets, for making the vegetarian version of "boneless chicken breasts in $pan_sauce." It makes Not-Chicken Piccata, Not-Chicken Marsala, and assorted other tasty dishes possible in my house.
Right now, I've got a BMI that puts me in the Platinum level. Don't know my blood cholesterol, as I haven't had health insurance for years and thus I haven't had it tested. I know my BMI mostly because the Wii Fit is obsessed with it.
Here's the thing, though. Right now, I'm not in terrific shape. Slender but sedentary. If I started working out more regularly, I'd probably put on muscle mass. And if I did that, I'd probably go UP in BMI, enough to bump me into the next category.
And how is THAT healthier?
The local Wild Harvest section at Shaw's is pretty good for most of my Cooking For Picky Vegetarians needs. The one thing I consistently can't get at Shaw's that I do at Whole Foods is No-Chicken Broth, and there are times when my homemade veggie stock just won't do for the purpose. I may have to look into buying that by the case, online.
They also carry the one brand of yogurt that my Picky Vegetarian housemate likes. She buys that herself. That's on her head.
I started taking pictures with a 110 Instamatic when my age was still in single digits. I switched back and forth between that and a 126 for a few years, and some of my best images are still from those cameras, despite their technical limitations. So I agree with Terry Karney about the most important part of photography being image selection.
When I got to high school, I signed up for a photography class as an art elective, and my dad gave me his old rangefinder Canon 35mm (he'd moved on to a more sophisticated SLR). No, I don't remember the model. It had a built-in light meter, but no other electronics. My dad had been an enthusiastic photographer for many years, and I think at one point he'd had a darkroom setup in our house -- my mother is still annoyed that he insisted on taking my newborn pictures in black and white, in case he wanted to print them himself. By the time I got interested, though, we no longer owned an enlarger. He did still have a sack full of the sort of flashbulbs you'd put on a Graflex flash tube. I'd been accustomed to the flash cubes and flash bars you could stick on an Instamatic. I say "sack," but it was actually a red canvas "No Parking" meter-cover that he'd swiped, somewhere in the misty past.
I got hooked. Developing wasn't particularly interesting, except for the challenge of doing something strictly by touch, but printing? Printing was heaven. Changing the light exposure timing until it looked just the way you wanted it to, dodging and burning to correct for things you couldn't solve with shutter speed and aperture when you'd taken the frame, timing the image in the bath to get all of the detail without overdeveloping... I could mess around printing for HOURS. And did. I applied to be a "guildmaster" for photography at my school, which meant I got a key to the darkroom and could use it any time I wanted, in exchange for agreeing to be present at certain times so the darkroom could be open without the teacher having to be there.
Our darkroom had running water and a goodly number of enlargers, and my dad donated his old glossy print dryer, but it wasn't without its problems. We hung the developed film in a series of lockers to dry, and we were downstairs from the ceramics studio, and there was clay dust EVERYWHERE. It was nearly impossible to get an unspeckled negative. Once I'd finished the offered classes, I got the negatives developed professionally, and just did my own printing, because the dust specks drove me insane.
One of the things I loved best was making hand-colored prints. I learned to make my exposure choices for a pale rather than a saturated effect -- almost the opposite of noir -- so that I could make the colors show effectively. I liked making the colors look realistic but faded. One of the best ones I did was of my oldest baby doll, whose painted features I'd nearly washed away over years of bathing her face.
One of the things I regret is never getting to use my dad's Mamiyaflex. I loved how it looked, and I was interested in using the large-format film, although the school enlargers had no plates for it and the one boy who was using one had to make his own enlarger plates out of manila folders. But my dad's Mamiyaflex was slightly damaged, and he judged it too expensive to repair, in the 1980s.
I haven't pursued photography as a hobby for years. But if I had ready access to a darkroom, it would be great fun to go in and just mess around.
Earl #898, do you mean the Mark Slackmeyer "Guilty! GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!" dance?
(I cannot tell you how much glee it gave me to see that reprised in 1987. I had been WAITING for it.)
Lee #587, Earl #589: I have to agree with both of you. Nice body, serious case of jerkface.
*sigh* what's HAPPENED to my home state?
The last restaurant I worked at was built in an old railroad depot, and there was a caboose out back serving as the office. It had as many excellent built-in cupboards and drawers as the pantry in the 1913 apartment I used to live in.
Kathryn from Sunnyvale @431:
My favorite option for comfortable all-day walking footwear has got to be Doc Martens with extra arch support insoles. I buy my Docs on eBay, both to save money and to get ones made in the UK rather than in China, as I know multiple instances of the Chinese-made ones not being durable. My favorite insoles come from The Walking Company.
Doc Marten boots look something like dress shoes if you wear them with trousers outside the boots. I like them with skirts as well, but this may not suit your fashion requirements. They're not especially warm, although they're warmer than sneakers, but warm socks can take care of that.
Xopher, etc.: ISTR Miss Manners, on the subject of "F* that" insults, saying something like "Miss Manners would like to know why references to a presumably delightful activity are so frequently used as insults. On second thought, no, she wouldn't."
My paperback Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.
I would also really like to know what happened to my Illuminatus! trilogy. I don't remember loaning it out.
I can't really call back my 2nd Edition AD&D manuals, even though I had the Deities and Demigods with the Melnibonean and Lankhmar sections, because I gave them away fair and square, but I sorta miss them now. I wouldn't have gone seeking out Michael Moorcock or Fritz Leiber if it hadn't been for them.
Funny, I always try to remember to put my turn signal on BEFORE I check my mirrors, in the (probably vain) hope that it'll give the driver in my intended lane a hint to hold back or speed up past me so as to give me a space. If I don't, there's invariably someone hanging just on my quarter, blocking my lane shift.
Also, that keeps me from doing the annoying thing of putting on my turn signal after I'm already moving into the lane.
I think the connecting theme between the Darkover and Pern novels, as I experienced them as a pre-teen/young teen in the 1980s, was the feudal-society setting. Dragons, castles, warriors, sorceresses... sure, but what KEPT me reading was the conflicts generated BY the social structure. Hold vs. Craft vs. Weyr; Comyn vs. Tower vs. Terran -- okay, that "vs." is a simplification, but that was where the interest came in, for me. That and the variety of female protagonists. Yes, Pern was awfully focused on First Woman Whatever, and some of the Darkover Renunciate stories and novels make me wince, in retrospect -- but neither of those worlds was exclusively male-inhabited or even male-centered, in terms of where the stories happened, even if the men were still overwhelmingly in charge.
I personally didn't CARE if they were technically fantasy or SF; they were MINE.
Xopher, my hearing recovered, but I was definitely relying on supplemental lip-reading to make sense of conversation for the next few hours!
(Hush, you. WITH MY EYES.)
Bruce @82: indeed, even a well-played set of bagpipes is NOT an instrument for small, enclosed spaces. I was at a convention party once -- in a room, mind you, not even a suite -- that was visited by pipers. And they were GOOD pipers! But the phrase "wall of sound" was a laughable understatement.
So far, weather.com is only predicting "snow showers" for my part of CT. I think I'll get that flashlight set tomorrow anyway, but I'm not going to panic otherwise. Just did the grocery shopping today, so we're all stocked on the requirements for a French Toast Emergency, and we've got shovels and salt.
Hoping that my northern friends come through with minimal inconvenience and no extended power outages.
Tim Walters @56: Not on WHDH in Boston, I wouldn't have. My embarrassingly thorough knowledge of Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond songs can be traced to their playlist.
Count me among the earwormed. I think it must have gotten a certain amount of MTV airplay, because in 1979 my popular music consumption was limited to a diet of the mainstream AM radio station my mother favored, but once we acquired cable with MTV in 1982, I spent hours glued to the screen.
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