Seeing unexpected things in the sky:
My family has been renting a fishing cottage on a small lake in eastern Ontario for many years now. At first we only could get the cabin for one week; later two, and now three.
Because it's so far away from city lights (~3.5 hrs from Toronto, 1 hr from Kingston, 2 hrs from Ottawa), the Milky Way is visible pretty much whenever the night sky is clear. However, one of the first years we went up there (I want to say it was year 2 or 3), it was an exceptional year for the Northern Lights, and they were visible that far south.
I still remember walking out onto the dock into the lake (because the shoreline and area near the cottage is so wooded, the beach and dock make for the best view of the sky), hearing the gentle lapping of the water on the shore punctuated by the occasional loon crying out, watching these ribbons of light glowing across the sky.
We've never seen them again. But we may yet.
Ginger @307: I'm sitting at my desk snickering. Without even following the link, I can imagine the expression on that poor bull's face.
Cat Meadors @309: Here's AB's fruitcake recipe, from Food Network. The show transcript is also available from the Good Eats Fanpage
I hope that the trip in the ambulance ends up having been the most exciting part of this entire interlude.
My best wishes for resumed/continued good health.
A question for the floor:
Does anyone have good guidelines for what pieces of paper should be kept, and for how long? I know tax returns and associated paperwork for 7 years; I figure most bills can probably max out after about a year; receipts/warranty information and instruction booklets as long as you own the item to which they pertain. But I still have many categories that I don't know how they should be categorized. (Bank statements: 7 yrs because they're financial? 1 yr because they're periodic like bills and interest and income get bundled into the tax stuff, which has a retention policy already? Statements from my 403(b) company? Auto insurance policies, after that year's policy has expired and the new one issued? Pitch immediately? Keep current year and n-1? N-2? Loan documents: at least the lifetime of the loan, right? How long after that? Are there sub-classes of loan documents (like the "we'd appreciate it if you sent us some money soon" letters) that can be pitched before the loan expires? [Please say Yes: I'm paying on a 30-year student loan, and if I have to keep every piece of paper tangentially related to it for the next 25-or-more years I'm going to *cry*] Et cetera, and so forth, and so on.
Some of my clutter problem is "stuff", compounded by the fact that I'm another one who does the, "Well, I last had it three weeks ago, when we were walking in the door from the trip to $destination, and I went straight to the bathroom, so I must have set it down *here*..." and walk there and, behold! There it lies. Unless someone moved it on me. Some is books (compounded by the fact that my catalog-the-nonfiction project has stalled - I need to get that back underway, once I re-discover a horizontal surface on which to do it...). But a lot of it is papers, because I don't know when I can pitch/shred them and which ones ought to be filed, so they just build up in boxes and piles and drifts and *augh*...
[I could have sworn I replied last night...]
Jim, thanks.
(Just as well; if I'd discovered that you went to high school with my father, I think my head would have imploded with the force of the worlds colliding. Although I suppose it would help to establish me as being a Real Person, as opposed to animated footwear. [Although I suppose footwear would have to post more frequently, and more contentiously, than I do.])
Jim, out of curiosity, when did you graduate Stepinac? I ask because my father is an alumnus, probably (based on his age) class of '64. (Feel free to email me if you don't want to air further details in public.)
Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm thinking either pepitas or, if I can't find them (for a reasonable price) either a streusel or brittle topping, depending on how adventurous I'm feeling on the day of. But thanks for the ideas! (Well, OK, most of the ideas. Captain Crunch?!)
*joins the T-shirt queue*
(before it becomes a queueueueueueueue, I hope...)
Request for advice:
I just watched America's Test Kitchen and am enamored of their sweet-potato casserole recipe. (5 lbs sweet potato + 1 cup brown sugar + salt/pepper, cooked down on the stovetop with a scant cup water [the sweet potatoes bring the rest of the required liquid], top with whole pecans and bake.)
However, the family with whom we're doing Thanksgiving includes someone with a (potentially fatal) nut allergy. Needless to say, the pecan topping is Right Out.
The topping seemed to provide a useful flavor and especially textural counterpoint to the sweet potatoes, so I'm loath to simply omit it. Does anyone have substitution ideas? I was thinking pepitas, at a first approximation, but any other ideas would be welcome. (He's allergic to both tree nuts and peanuts, so no substitutions in either of those families would work in this case.)
Anne Sheller @13:
I've got Moonwulf, rather than Juanita, on the in-brain radio, but otherwise yes. And I'd queue up (or, more meaningfully, pre-order) the Keller album if/when it materializes. On the other hand, Roper spent the year occupied with a) a blown knee and the surgeries and recoveries appurtenant thereto, and b) a brand-new daughter. He's a little pre-occupied :)
Re: 611 and 620:
"Rainbow Connection" always makes me think of "A Boy and His Frog", by Tom Smith, mostly because, when he performs the song live, he often follows it with "Rainbow Connection".
This is a YouTube video of "A Boy and His Frog"; the audio is from Tom's album "Who Let Him In Here?", and was recorded live at Marcon. Tom heard about Jim's death just before the convention, wrote the song at-con, and debuted it in his concert the next day, leaving himself and most of the audience in tears.
From today's Tomato Nation:
I don't know about you, but if I were in the fire zone in SoCal and I heard that Governor Schwarzenegger had called FEMA for aid, I'd be like, "You know what actually, we're good. No, it's fine, seriously. No, we'll just…dig a moat or something, really, don't get up. Please."
RM @118: If you're running Firefox, you can also install the LEETkey extension. It has a whole bunch of text transformers, including ROT-13, built in. (As you read, you can highlight text, right-click, and select ROT13 transformation from the LEETkey branch of your context menu. Very nice! And it stays translated until you navigate away from the page and come back.)
Jenny Islander @151: In other news, Betsey Langan, do you have relatives in Alaska or around Puget Sound? Or, going the other way, in Ireland?
The family is Irish originally, yes, but I don't know what generation emigrated or from where in Ireland. (My grandparents were born in the Edgewater Park section of the Bronx.) There are no relatives that I know of in Alaska or the Pacific North-wet, but I'm sure there are branches I know not of :)
Fragano @80: Eep!
End-organ perfusion = Good(TM). 70/50 is well into "You walked in here, how, exactly?"
I hope the cause was found and addressed before you had to eat too much hospital "food".
Brenda/noen:
You're quite welcome for the research. Thank you in turn for your apology.
As has been observed, we're all on high alert against trolls right now, probably as a reaction to the thread entitled "Weirdly Similar...". There are some respondents over there who are belligerent, markedly clue-deficient, and highly resistant to any attempt (whether gentle or forceful) to impart clue. So after your first and second posts, most of the regulars went, "Oh, $deity, not another one!"
I, for one, am glad you're not "another one". Please do stick around, watch the threads go by and get a feel for the normal tenor of interactions (hopefully we'll stand down from high alert soon).
Noen @116: Your proof that soap detergents do not kill bacteria:
"In summary, plain soap has basically no antimicrobial activity. A simple hand wash can reduce transient bacteria by 0.5 to 3 log10 units but has no real effect on the resident hand flora."
From "Epidemiologic Background of Hand Hygiene and Evaluation of the Most Important Agents for Scrubs and Rubs". Clinical Microbiology Review, 17.4.863-893.2004.
Full text available online, at the link. Quite extensive reference section, too, for further reading and edification.
Teresa @529:
How about:
To improve the lives of those living with $disease by funding research into its causes and treatments; educating, supporting, and advocating for patients and their families; and increasing public understanding of the condition.
joann @37: Excuse me, in #36 I meant "time-to-chill". I've already proven that frozen cokes are Not Good.
Actually, frozen cokes are Good, provided you make them without freezing them in the (about-to-be-)ex-can, thereby creating a gods-awful mess in the freezer.
(Admittedly, I'm thinking more "slushy" stage than "cokesicle" stage. But the shrapnel-and-coke-everywhere stage is Right Out.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 5 |
| 2007 | 25 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 10 |
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