Small Talk: The Library

[cko]

We rang in the New Year at 830 pm. Mostly so my nephew could go hang with his friends but it was a relief to all. Anyway we'd pretty much finished the homemade potato chips, caviar, and oysters by then. I'm actually trying to see if I can go to sleep before midnight! Woo hoo!

 

Buffyjunkie, it's a kind of mahjongg solitaire where the "tiles" are piled up and you remove them in pairs. Yeah, I know! Riveting!

 

Vibes to KPC and family, and AnnieF, I know what you mean about that thing, yeah.

 

Let's go 2016!!!!

[Erratic]

We had a turkey dinner with the in laws, watched 'The Martian' and were in bed by 10.30pm.

Rave on, party dudes. Rave on.

And Happy New Year to you all.

[romantic idiot]

Wish you all a very Happy New Year!! 

[Chyna]

We ate pasta and ice cream, watched "Kiki's Delivery Service," and I was in bed by 10:30. 

[trudi-tru]

You are so my kind of people.

[KittenPokerCheater]

I skyped with some old friends.  It was chill.  I am feeling kind of Lethal Weapony about New Years:  "I'm too old for this shit."

 

Happy 2016 everyone!  I hope it's wonderful, safe, fun, and joyful for everyone.

 

Today, my exciting new year's day plans are to do laundry and tidy up.   I'm such a party girl these days.

[Loandbehold]

Happy (belated) New Year!

[buffyjunkie]

Oh, I love Kiki! In fact, I bought socks on Amazon with 4 different Miyazaki movie themes. So far 2016 has brought two good - well one good and one great movie: The Martian and The Woman in Gold.

I am also facing reality and purging all the T-neck, wool, and cashmere sweaters I can no longer wear with only a handful retained for either sentimental or hopeful reasons.

Edited January 3, 2016 by buffyjunkie

[cko]

I must have missed an update, buffyjunkie: why no wool?

 

So far 2016 is shaping up rather lazy, since our cousins left on Saturday, it's been nothing but lazing around, minor clean up, and eating all weekend, including today since I don't go back to work until Wednesday. Though I have been waking up with a vague sense of dread--not sure why this is--that takes the form of "well you said you weren't going to think about stuff until after the holidays and now it's after the holidays, so....." ("Stuff" = the business of life, from which I've taken a rather blessed hiatus since Dad died...)

 

Anyway, never mind that! Onward to whatever the days shall bring!

 

Edited January 4, 2016 by cko

[Hostile16]

You can easily make pillows out of sweaters if you have a favorite you'd like to look at, buffyjunkie, since you can't wear.

Came home Saturday to my Secret Santa present, from someone who knew I wanted to read more stuff of substance in 2016: copies of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World. Politics that doesn't have anything to do with 2016 elections! Trump not even in the indexes! Of course there is that Super PAC decision, but still... woot! Thanks, Secret Santa!

[Earl Is Dead]

I haven’t been here in a few weeks since I’ve been off from work and I have issues using the forums on my phone (and I can’t with the mobile version, sorry PTV), so I apologize for playing catchup.  

My Christmas was a four day extravaganza of family gatherings, alternating between my family and Mr. Earl’s, so it was a marathon of planning and running and dealing with people.  In a way it makes me feel better to read your stories about family dust ups and people who just can’t not be a dick because at least I know I’m not alone.  The Sunday after Christmas, the fourth and final day of festivities, was the worst because we hosted it, which just added stress (for me) to an already tense gathering.  Multiple can’t-not-be-dicks from the Mister’s side, and a bat$h*t MIL crammed into a very tiny living space do not a fun evening make.  What is so hard about civility?  I don’t understand. 

It worked out well for me that I had off the week between Christmas and New Year’s off from work to recover.  No events for New Year’s Eve but had friends over for dinner Near Year’s Day.  Fun, but also the last time I will be seeing this friend for a while as she has relocated out of state and has no more trips scheduled home for the foreseeable future.  L I am going to miss seeing her. 

KPC tons of vibes to you and your dad-not-dad.  I hope you and your mom and his family get to spend as much time as possible with him and that he is comfortable.  Fuck cancer indeed.

Congratulations, Erratic for the Parents Get Out status for little Alf!  I hope things move quickly and smoothly on his adoption from here on out.

Here’s to a good or better 2016 for all!

[Erratic]

My inlaws left today after six days of @old old fashioned racism", and comments about how they racially profile natives because natives are normally the problem (they live in an Inuit community and my kid is 100% Cree), and constantly mispronouncing the word, 'quinoa' as 'kee-WAHN' even though I have told them for 4 years that they are wrong, and oh, my favourite:

FiL (to Kory): your sister wants to go to Mexico for a week and leave the boys with Jason (her husband). Can you believe that? Can you imagine what Rachael would say if you took off for a week and left her with the baby?

???? HE is he one who keeps bringing Kory back up North to help him with his shit all the fucking time leaving me with the baby and no fucking help!

Sigh.

They have left. Yay.

Tomorrow I am starting the Whole 30 program. Today I carb load and drink.

[buffyjunkie]

Jesus Erratic, I'd def want a drink too.

"why no wool?" Still with the hotflashes, cko. Not as bad as last year but still warm enough to avoid heavy wool.

Today I tried to clean the upstairs bedrooms but it seems I just keep shifting things around. Now a ridiculously dated wedding dress is under the guest bed but at least I can access the photo albums in the guest room closet. I have serious issues parting with cards and photos.

[cko]

Ohhh, hot flashes. Well, they will pass at some point! Though I've never been one for wool, tending to run hot in general (hee hee). I was wondering if that was it; at the homey style place where I had breakfast, they had a wooden sign up that made me think of you: "I'm still hot...but only in flashes." Usually I think those kinds of things are dumb, but that made me chuckle.

 

Fighting off a cold so going to bed before 10 pm, wheeee!

[Endeavour]

I took some time off around the holidays which was nice but trying to get back into the swing of things at work is proving difficult. My mind is still in vacation mode.

I hope everyone is recovering from family time and I'm glad the difficult relatives are now back home where they belong.

[trudi-tru]

Erratic, do your inlaws enjoy provoking you or are they really that clueless? I'm surprised your husband is such a nice man considering where he comes from.

Buffyjunkie, does wool bother you even if you wear a cotton shirt under it? It's the only way I tolerate it.

[buffyjunkie]

I seem to have more sensitivity to it the older I get. My go-to is now a thin wool blend sweater (no turtle-neck.) It is funny in a twisted sort of way given that I had always been a "freezy cat" when younger.

Found out buffy-junkie daughter's passport expires really soon so I known what we will be doing.

Hope everyone is easing into the new year OK and all colds are quickly vanquished.

[Chyna]

Pet peeve of the week: Parents (with kids over the age of 6) who complain about making lunches. When the kids went back to school this week, I saw so many FB posts from parents (mostly mothers) saying "OMG I have to make lunches again!" If you like doing it, great--enjoy. But if you don't, but you do it anyway for children who are able to practice piano, play soccer, and write their own names, then you've made a choice. Don't complain about what you choose to do.

 

My kids have been making their own lunches every day since Tiny C was 7 (and we started doing that when I remembered that my brother started making his when he was 5.)

 

Rant over. :)

[AnnieF]

My kids started making their own lunches in 3rd grade, I think? They didn't want me to do it anymore. They weren't quite as into doing their own laundry when I made that happen (when the F-let was around 10) but them's the breaks, kiddoes. If you are able to do the task safely and satisfactorily, yay! It is now your task. This seems like Parenting 101 to me, but evidently it's not. :(

[Erratic]

AnnieF, you eat mostly paleo, right? I am on day 3 of Whole 30 and the gas and bloating is bad. Any suggestions?

[Chyna]

I had the same problem when I did the Whole 30. A probiotic vitamin supplement with digestive enzymes helped a lot--I just took it for a few days till things settled out.

[AnnieF]

^^^^^This.

I do eat mostly paleo-ish. Food is kind of a problem for me, in that I can't taste very well and have a hard time keeping myself fed. Hard-boiled eggs, kefir, and nuts. Lots of nuts. That's what I eat. Oh and those meal-replacement shakes -- they're not too bad when made with hemp milk, which is frelling delicious, by the way. Highly tecommended. :-)

Ha, that went to a complainy place, but yeah, probiotics w/digestive enzymes are the way to go. Good luck with the program!

[buffyjunkie]

Finally saw Star Wars. Loved the two new young characters but can't say I was overly impressed.

[Erratic]

AnnieF, your food thing sucks. Are some flavours better than others?

I will try to find some probiotics, I could only find infant ones this morning, but I did get me some digestive enzymes. We had been invited to a brunch, so we looked like total food snobs turning down the French toast bread pudding and sausages and only picking at the potatoes and fruit platter.

I thought I had finally figured out homemade mayo yesterday, but today it tasted a little oily, so I gave it a quick zap with the immersion blender and turned it into oil and egg soup again and couldn't revive it.

Finally, 4 eggs later, I made a decent avocado oil based mayo that is light and fluffy and not broken one iddy biddy bit, even when I shakily added the lemon juice like a pastry cook pulling out a soufflé in a blizzard.

[AnnieF]

Spicy things like curry or salsa make an impression, and smoky/salty things like bacon and seaweed. Otherwise I'm mostly looking for mouthfeel or texture, so crunchy things like nuts, or creamy things like the hemp milk, which is way better than almond milk, texture-wise. It is a fairly large bummer.

Yay for mayo success, Erratic! I have a thought, feel free as always to completely disregard -- in my experience, you're better off hand-whisking the mayo, rather than using the immersion blender. When you do it by hand, you can't go too fast, but the immersion blender can take you from perfect to "oh fuck" before you ever see that the mayo is about to break. You can go too slow, of course, which is one reason why people don't do it by hand -- you do have to whisk the hell out of it. Use a big bowl, bigger than you might think you need, because you want to have a lot of room to whisk in.

so we looked like total food snobs turning down the French toast bread pudding and sausages and only picking at the potatoes and fruit platter.

This is a bit different from the paleo way of being a snob about it, which would be to eat the sausages and fruit, and shun the bread and potatoes. My mom cannot wrap her head around the idea of not eating potatoes, but they were never a huge fave of mine, so not a big deal to give up. Bread was the one that gave me cravings, about three days into the elimination diet.

[Erratic]

The sausages were maple syrup flavoured and probably had breadcrumbs in them too.

We have been shunning most potatoes, but they are allowed on the Whole 30, and sugar or sweeteners of any kind (except natural placement in fruits/veggies) are banned.

I like the idea of hand whisking the mayo. My other mistake the other day was using EVOO. It was way too oily tasting, so I used avocado oil yesterday and it was a much better taste.

[Chyna]

I make my homemade mayo in the food processor--that way I can pour the oil in reallllly slowly through the top opening, while the whole thing continues to mix. It's never "broken" on me.

I also didn't like it with EVOO--tasted very bitter to me. Avocado oil or regular olive oil (not EV) are much better.

[AnnieF]

Oh yeah, food processor. I almost never think to use a food processor for anything; at culinary school we had to do most of the things a food processor can do by hand or with a mandoline, and after that I was really not comfortable (or familiar) with how a Cuisinart might make some of this chopping and shredding less laborious. Even in the test kitchen, we barely used one. Now I'm wondering why that was, actually, because while it can be nearly impossible to have enough time to use the processor in a restaurant kitchen, that wasn't the case in the test kitchen, so why did we shun the machine? I'm pretty sure it comes down to chef culture and chef snobbery. "You need a machine to julienne carrots for you? Oookay, Sparky, anything else? Footrest? Warm milk?"

Chefs are total assholes to each other. Out of love. ;)

The sausages were maple syrup flavoured and probably had breadcrumbs in them too.

Arrrggghhh hidden sweeteners and gluten, how I hate you! Did y'all know that IHOP makes their scrambled eggs with pancake batter added in? Because sure, why not? Arrrgghhhhhhhh!! Edited January 10, 2016 by AnnieF

[Erratic]

That is just odd!

[Chyna]

Arrrggghhh hidden sweeteners and gluten, how I hate you!

My friend's wife lost TEN YEARS of her life to a gluten allergy, because even when she thought she was avoiding gluten, she wasn't: Her pain meds (that they were giving her for the extreme headaches caused by gluten) had gluten in them that the docs didn't even know about!

[AnnieF]

The IHOP thing is a cost-saving measure: pancake batter is cheaper than eggs, so if you can make the eggs stretch by adding batter, and your customers don't notice, why not do it, is the thought process. Restaurants operate with razor-thin profit margins, so anything you can do to cut food costs is a no-brainer.

Her pain meds (that they were giving her for the extreme headaches caused by gluten) had gluten in them that the docs didn't even know about!

Oh, that is infuriating. I mean, okay, the interferon that I used for a short time was produced with hamster ovaries, which: ew. But at least it said that on the product insert. The drug company has to disclose that info, but with gluten, I don't think there's any requirement. AFAIK. Which is complete bullshit. Pharmaceutical companies lobby very hard for loosening labeling and disclosure requirements, and they've been very successful during the last two decades. I'm sure they'd love it if they didn't have to disclose the hamster ovary thing either. But allergens! Ughhh, there should be no way to get out of having to disclose a known allergen. Edited January 10, 2016 by AnnieF

[Chyna]

I think she said that they don't have to mention it if it's not an "active" ingredient. The gluten is just there to hold the pill together in pill form, so they don't need to disclose it.

Edited January 10, 2016 by Chyna

[Erratic]

Oh Chyna, how awful!

[AnnieF]

I have so much to do today, and I feel as though I have to keep a tight lid on my feelings because if I allow myself to really accept that David Bowie is gone, I willl dissolve into grief. That's him in my avatar; he is such an important artist to me and I am really feeling like it is unfair that I have to accept this when Terry Pratchett also just died.

Goddamnit.

[KittenPokerCheater]

David Bowie...I am shocked, mostly because the thought of him dying never entered my head.  Of course he'd never die.  He's immortal.  I can't wrap my head around it.

 

So hugs to all.

 

I don't know what this 30 days thing you are all talking about, but it sounds a little tortuous.  

 

erratic, your in laws are....so awful it's almost humorous.  I am glad they are gone and it's back to you and K getting to be awesome parents to your little alien life form.

 

Not to bury the lead BUT....I got a phone call from my Might as well be Dad (henceforth referred to as Dad2).  He sounded so much better.  He is home, he seems to be responding to the treatment (something WAS at 110 and it now at 25- this is a good thing).  Now it's rest rest rest.  Glory Be!  Thank you all for your industrial MM vibes.  I will happily donate a kidney should any of you every need one.

 

My sister and I were making our breakfast and lunches by the time I was in second grade.  Sometimes I fear that kids are not going to grow up at all, the way some people (my sister) helicopter over their kids.  Also, get off my lawn.

[buffyjunkie]

Aww, Annie - hugs. I was shocked as well and then wondered if he and Iman were still married and then I got to feeling horrible for her.

I have nothing to add regarding mayo other than the store-bought kind tastes like crap.

[Endeavour]

My friend's wife lost TEN YEARS of her life to a gluten allergy, because even when she thought she was avoiding gluten, she wasn't: Her pain meds (that they were giving her for the extreme headaches caused by gluten) had gluten in them that the docs didn't even know about!

This is terrible.

We are now hearing that an issue my mom has been having for about a year could be due to one of the meds she is taking. This, after several doctor and hospital visits. I've been looking into it on my own and now I'm not sure if it's the one med or a potential conflict with another. The potential conflict med has already been removed, but it's not as easy to switch out or remove the other med. Ergh, thanks useless doctors.

I'm sorry, AnnieF. I think I can understand. I remember how much John Lennon's death affected me.

KPC, so glad to hear the good news about Dad2.

Vibes to all who need them.

Edited January 12, 2016 by Endeavour

[Harvester]

Woot, woot!!! For KPC and clan.

Condolences Annie. He was an amazing artist, and just a genuinely great person it seems. I've been listening to his last album. He definitely left at the top of his game. I am relieved he didn't have to endure a media frenzy. He was just too cool for that nonsense.

[Valny]

I keep getting tricked by a good plot description into watching recent French films only to be almost always disappointed (exception: The Intouchables). Has anyone seen Clouds of Sils Maria? Care to explain what happens before the action shifts to London?

There was action?  :) 

I'd say, NOTHING happens. Believe me, I kept waiting....but nope. Talk,talk, talk, talk talk...and and there was,,,talk!

 

Woot, woot!!! For KPC and clan.

 

  Yes, big woots for you KPC!

 

Did anyone see The Martian?  I liked it fine(not as much as many) but whenever it came to the science-y or tech talk(and there was enough) my eyes would glaze over and  I just didn't care. And it was a longish movie. Just get Matt Damon back already.

I started watching the indie horror film It Follows,  Now that didn't put me to sleep! It was really something different. Really not very scary to me though.

Edited January 12, 2016 by Valny

[romantic idiot]

I liked The Martian.

 

I am so sorry for you guys mourning Pratchett and Bowie. So sad.

[Hostile16]

Hey, need some good news? My sister and family just visited Dad, and in her usual (lovingly) pushy way, she badgered Dad into getting a new cat. And in his (lovingly) stubborn way, he refused to bring it home while the house was full of "upsetting strangers."

So I took everyone to the airport at sunrise, expecting to meet her when I got home, but he put it off until the shelter, which has weird hours, closed. AND it's closed all day tomorrow. Grrr. But still, Miss Sadie Green will be awaiting pickup Thursday morning. Squee! I spend half the week with Dad, but it's going to be a lot easier leaving him now that he has a pal again.

[Endeavour]

I liked The Martian but agree it was long. I also thought the ending was a bit much.

Has anyone watched Making a Murderer? Just wow. It's not light viewing in the least. I was amazed at some of the behavior revealed.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Endeavour

[Erratic]

We started 'Making a Murderer' last night. I've had several friends recommend it to me, so I am giving it a go. One episode down and I am intrigued and saddened and angry. I heard that '60 Minutes' or something like that are doing a documentary based on the Investigation and prosecution team, so that'd be interesting.

[Valny]

Has anyone watched Making a Murderer? Just wow. It's not light viewing in the least. I was amazed at some of the behavior revealed.

 

 

Making a Murderer was fascinating and infuriating. It really started getting good at around ep three, but the big thing that happens at the end of ep four was jaw dropping and I had to watch the next ep right away. 

This show has had a buzz around it for a while,I know it's been all over FB and even celebs are tweeting about it(I'm not on Twitter but I've read some stuff being said)

 

Hostile16, yay for your dad getting some kitty company. It will make him happy.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Valny

[Endeavour]

Brace yourself, Erratic. It just gets more intense.

And ep 4 was a doozy. I liked how the PTV post about that ep was just a series of WTFs.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Endeavour

[buffyjunkie]

Oh, Hostile16, that IS good news. I'm glad for both of you.

[trudi-tru]

New kitten! Yay!

 

I'm sorry Annie. I wonder if Bowie "planned" his death in some way (not that he killed himself, more like speeding the process) or knew his days were numbered, considering it happened right after he released his last album. A last goodbye to the world he knew he was about to leave.

[dusky]

Hi all I have a question for you, as you know my daughter's father is, well you know, but my daughter is entering community college, also she is currently in the midst of costly dental repair and I of course continue to feed, house, and clothe her as well as providing her with health insurance. Should I reach out to her father to see if he would care to throw a few bucks her way or is it just not worth the anger I will feel when he tells me he will not do it?

 

Vibes to all, 

[Erratic]

Fuck yes. And grandma too!

Can you really get too much more angry when your expectation level is zero?

[trudi-tru]

Yeah, I'd say give it a try, with very low expectations.

 

Alan Rickman! No! He was 69 too. Damn.