cyclonefence
cyclonefence's JournalEvery story on how Sweden is staying open during the pandemic
without the dire results we all fear should be required to mention that Sweden is a small country with a small population where income inequality is not an issue and where anyone who is feeling unwell can receive immediate medical treatment, free. I bet in Sweden anybody who wants a test gets a test.
Florida fudging covid19 numbers
A reporter just appeared on Chris Cuomo's CNN show, and she said that Florida is counting ill and dead covid victims based on their permanent addresses. If they do not live permanently in Florida, they are not counted. Spring breakers are not counted; snowbirds are not counted.
This is an outrage.
"With more testing, the number of cases will go up"
--Donald J. Trump
Now we know for sure why we'll never get sufficient testing while he's in office. He said it himself, succinctly and (for once) truthfully.
Two things my cat likes to do (three if you count walking on my keyboard)
1. She likes to get into the mesh fold-up laundry hamper and be pulled around, fast, over as many different surfaces as I can find. She attacks them all through the mesh. If I walk around pulling an empty hamper she appears from nowhere and jumps into it for a ride.
2. She likes to sit on an office-type chair and be spun around as if it were a carnival ride, again the faster the better.
She is a cat that has always spurned cat toys. She likes to fight with pencils (either end) and kitchen twine. She also hates the rubber thing on the end of my cane and would like to kill it.
Cute animal videos please
I'm feeling morbid. Temp of 99.9 last night and twice today.
Cartoons used to make me cheer up, but they're not funny anymore. I've watched all the Joe Peras on Adult Swim at least four times each, then I hit the one where his grandmother dies and it's back to zero. Even Food Wars ("his shirt flew off!"
is no comfort anymore.
"Discovering" new foods
A long time ago, I read an essay by Russell Baker how his family first encountered spaghetti and struggled with how to eat it. I was surprised--I come from a family which for generations was not exposed to new foods and who treated them with suspicion, but which had always afaik eaten spaghetti--and no, we're not Italian.
I asked my mother, and she said they'd always eaten spaghetti with meat sauce when she was growing up.
I've been trying to think of foods I take for granted that were introduced to my family during my lifetime, and the only one I can come up with is pizza.
When I was little--5 or 6 years old--I was taken for the first time to a bowling alley. No one in my family bowled, and I, and probably they, had never been in a bowling alley before. The bowling alley served snack-ish food like hot dogs, but somehow my parents had learned that it served pizza. They must have been told by someone else that it was delicious because they were not adventurous enough to have sought it out on their own. Anyway, pizza slices in that bowling alley were my (and I'm sure my parents') introduction to pizza. My mother began to buy the Chef Boyardee pizza kits in a box for a treat.
Let me stress how frightened of unfamiliar foods my parents were. One Christmas about ten years ago, they complained sneeringly that someone had sent them a smoked turkey breast--which they threw away!
Did your family come late to a food we now commonly eat?
I have never loved the cute animal videos as much as I do now
Thanks to all who post them--they lift my heart.
I broke down and made oatmeal cookies today
I miss going to the grocery store because I am inspired by what I see there to decide what to cook. I also generally buy myself a little treat like an individual pecan pie--we don't keep sweets in the house. My husband goes to the store; we keep it to once a week or less frequently--and btw, what is being called "hoarding" might be folks like us who buy more than we need right now so we won't have to go out again.
Anyway, he occasionally brings me a sweet treat, but not always stuff I like, so I decided to make cookies. I avoid making cookies when it's just us at home because there we are stuck with a dozen or more cookies whereas at the store I could buy just one big one. Anyway, I started looking through my recipes, and they all took lots of eggs, or whole milk/cream, nuts or cream cheese--stuff I don't keep on hand. Well, eggs I have, but I want to eat those for breakfast.
Then I found an oatmeal cookie recipe that uses old fashioned oats, which I don't have the patience right now to cook for breakfast (a big container, too), butter, which I have in the freezer, brown sugar and *one* egg.
Oh my god are they good. I've got 20 of them. My husband is a diabetic and I am known to binge. We are doomed, but we'll go down with smiles on our faces.
On edit: my husband shamed me into taking them over to my daughter's group home and leaving them for the staff (the three ladies are on a strict eating plan). So no coma for him and no bloat for me.
I dreamed about merthiolate last night
I cut up stuff for salad with an old device called a Feemster slicer, which is a poor woman's mandoline. I hate making (and eating) salads, but my husband feels they are part of a healthy diet, and I love my husband, so I make him salads. This slicer makes it a lot easier.
But of course I slice my thumb on a regular basis, and a couple of days ago I did it again. It was no big deal--shallow but bloody--but it left one of those annoying dead skin flaps. This one was too small for me to bite or cut off. Plus it was sore. I rubbed Neosporin into it, but it still hurt.
In my dream, I kept asking people if they had any merthiolate or gentian violet.
As a kid, those were my preferred antiseptics. Unlike iodine (which is what I ended up painting my thumb with) they didn't sting--gential violet was especially gentle, but my mother hated it because of the stains it left.
When my parents died and the house was being emptied, I was unable to see to it myself. I told my husband and son I wanted everything out of the medicine cabinet, but they thought I was joking. Merthiolate, gentian violet, *paragoric* which is *opium*, cough medicine with *codeine* in it, and "drawing" ointment, which supposedly "drew" infection out of boils and things. It all got thrown away, dammit.
Were there wonderful over-the-counter medicines when you were a kid?
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