Cookbooks?

If anyone is interested in any of the following cookbooks (or if you know anyone who would like them), please let me know and I will gladly pass them along to you! All are in like-new condition except as noted otherwise.

Bones  (small tear to spine of dust jacket)
Fat
Olympia Provisions
Eat Your Vegetables
The Paleo Foodie Cookbook (some wear to the front cover)

Please forgive the laziness in the formatting of this post - I'm trying to bang out a bunch of things this morning.

-hugs-
 

Indestructable

This is our *third* guaranteed indestructible splitting maul.

Much like our border collies, we apparently do not respect that "indestructible" means you're not supposed to be able to break something. *sigh*

Thankfully, my husband is talented and was able to replace the handle but I seriously think there's a design flaw somewhere. How many centuries have people been chopping/splitting wood? And we don't have truly indestructible tools for the purpose yet? Somebody should get on that.

In the meantime, if it wanted to STOP BEING COLD so that we didn't NEED to keep chopping/burning firewood, I'd be extremely on board.

Happy Easter!

Saw this on tumblr and had to share because it made me laugh really hard.  : )

Work Quote of the Day

Submitted via the online comment system:

"Although my diet is strictly limited, I do love that I am allowed to eat at your restaurant and I love my bear claws!"

Me: ...

Me: "What *exactly* are you strictly limiting in your diet if you're still eating bear claws?! Because it's obviously not sugar, salt, wheat/gluten, fat, sugar, preservatives, major allergens.... Seriously, I'm curious. What ARE you limiting? Vegetables?!

(sigh)

Word of the Day

I ran across an awesome word today: insalubrious.

in·sa·lu·bri·ous
/insəˈlo͞obrēəs/

 adjective, formal: (especially of a climate or locality) not salubrious; unhealthy

  

I can't think of the last time I've seen this word in print or heard it used anywhere, but it's much too fabulous to be so neglected, don't you think?

1.  

Customer Quote of the Day

Customer, talking to my boss today at work: "So my friends made me go to this musical and, you know, there was music -..."

(That was when I stopped listening because, um, hello?! Musicals that have music in them? You don't say!)

Hope you got a free laugh somewhere in your day today, too. : )

Random Fun Fact About Allergies

From a book I recently finished:

"There are many foods that share similar compounds with common allergens. For instance, wheat and grass can both cause a kind of cross-reaction. So can, oddly enough, bananas and latex." (x)

Wheat and grass I get, but... bananas and latex?!?

In case you needed a reminder that the world is a weird, weird place... there you go.  : )

Modern Twist on H.H.Holmes' MO?

Last week, my mom and I were talking and the book Devil the White City came up. (Supposedly, it's being turned into a Leonardo DiCaprio movie, now.)

The book follows the intertwined stories of the Chicago World's Fair and serial killer H.H. Holmes who capitalized on the massive traffic the event drew to the city to find nearly untraceable victims (all young women) who he then murdered and disposed of in his hotel of horrors.

(Disclaimer: my mom liked the book, I wasn't as much a fan. There are some great documentaries on Holmes free on youtube, though, which I have thoroughly enjoyed.)

The book/topic came up again this week when I saw the discussion displayed on the right of this post online (original here) discussing the Startup Castle in Silicon Valley.

Billing itself as "a community of excellence" specially designed to gather and equip STEM rockstars in an environment with every drool-worthy support they could need (including dedicated Angel investors) to launch their own thriving start-up tech company, it's been dissected by a wide variety of sources from a bunch of different angles... and the conclusions are always scary.

What made me pick this particular discussion to show you, though, (aside from the great "organ harvesting" line) was how freakily well they drew the connection between the reasonable-on-the-surface screening criteria for the Castle and the type of person it would lead to attracting - docile and easy to make disappear.

Which is, of course, EXACTLY what H.H. Holmes did a century ago! Set himself up with a gorgeous building in a desirable location. Developed rules/requirements for who he'd let in that looked upstanding and suggested safety and class for everyone who made the cut, but subtly also resulted in collecting a bunch of people who were hard to track and easy to lose. 

Kind of creepy, no?

Makes me glad we have the internet these days to help draw attention to and spread awareness of this sort of thing. Not that I expect that will be enough to root out all such dangerous places, but it puts us far and away ahead of those poor souls in Chicago at the turn of the last century who didn't have it and paid the price. 

Wit and Grace

Author Neil Gaiman is a riot and I just had to share this with you guys. Someone left the above message on his tumblr account... and his reply was delightful. One hundred and one ways to deal with trolls online, right?

Also, for the record, I think "Amanda Palmer Is Very Inconvenient" would be a hysterical title for an autobiography! I'd definitely have read more biographies in school (or at least read them less grudgingly) if they came with titles like that!

: )

100 Days of Productivity

I recently ran across a challenge online called "100 Days of Productivity".

The original idea is pretty simple and geared toward Instagram/Tumblr in that you do something (anything) productive every day, and post a picture representative of it online. Obviously, my personality type is too geared toward productivity in general for that to be anything new or helpful for me as is. Moreover, I not a fan of taking/posting photos, so that whole tracking process would derail me completely.

But as we near the end of the year, I can't help but be attracted to the potential of a slightly modified version. There's a lot to like about the idea of starting something in the next couple weeks that rolls over into the new year - it feels like a headstart on a New Years resolution, with the added awesomeness that it's only for a set period of time instead of the whole year. By the time you hit March, for example, you could be celebrating already having banged out something great and feel like you'd set a positive tone for the year. It also feels like it might provide some welcome focus through the usual mess of the holidays and the generally cold, dreary weeks that follow when everything slows down and drags. 

The question, then, becomes what target to set or what subject to pick to specifically work on. I want it to be different from what I'm already doing (like reading a chapter of something a day) and separate from long-term health habits I'm trying to establish (working out, drinking enough water). And, of course, if it's going to be worth doing and set next year up well, it needs to be a goal that matters.

I've been picking at a couple ideas, and I think I've almost got it narrowed down, but I'd be curious to hear what everyone else thinks. If you were going to do 100 Days of (Focused) Productivity, what would you choose? Anyone want to do it as a shared challenge with me?

More Random (And Awful) Historical Facts

Apparently, for the better part of a century, the British Navy thought it would be a good plan to flog people for getting scurvy. Even after they knew it was an illness, and still later when they figured out it was a deficiency disease of some kind, the practice carried on. I have not yet figured out the logic behind taking someone who is already not functional and flogging them... it's clearly not going to improve their ability to work, no matter what you think the root cause is.

Lack of logic remained rampant, however. They later decided that a great solution to beriberi (another deficiency disease) would be giving people arsenic. Or strychnine... just for variety. (*Cringe.*)

Again, some days I wonder how the human race has lasted as long as we have. On the bright side, our bizarre insistence on self-delusion and penchant for making matters worse as often and drastically as possible makes for great reading!! : p

Appallingly True Random Fact

In the immediate post-Civil War era, heroin was introduced as a "wonder drug"... to treat diabetes.

Despite being a heavily refined variant of morphine, which they knew was addictive, professional chemists and physicians of the time were quite confident that heroin wouldn't be addictive at all.

Does anyone else read world history and occasionally wonder how we haven't killed ourselves off as a species yet?

It's Good Not To Be A Manager

Yesterday at work, there were two different repair guys in: one was working on the rethermalizer (essentially a giant box of hot water that we use to heat bags of soup) and the other was working on the walk-in freezer. The entire freezer/cooler area smelled like burning metal, which wasn't encouraging, but was apparently the least of our worries.

The guy working on the rethermalizer shut the whole thing down, informed my General Manager that the plug and outlet it was connected to were charred, and he really had no idea how we hadn't burned the entire cafe to the ground yet. Yikes!

So the GM goes to grab our back-up portable unit from storage. While he's gone, the cafe gets a call that someone was drilling just down the street and hit a gas line... which they thought was connected to our (giant) rack oven. So the manager on duty had to run out and tell the day bakers to shut the ovens off until further notice - because we're only a bakery cafe and don't need those or anything.

All I could think as I headed out to my truck (finally) was that it was a really, really good day not to be a manager. The manager who counted my drawer ended up working 13 hours yesterday... and I went home on time, and left all the drama behind. I don't miss being in her shoes at all.

Tomorrow we have piles of regional corporate company. My GM dared me to throw a brioche roll at the District Manager's head. It's an unreasonably tempting offer, but I think I'll probably be good. (Probably.)

Hope everyone else is having a less dramatic week than where I work!

I Need That Search Program They Have On Cop Shows

Not a wallet I will ever own.

Have you ever watched any of those cop shows (or almost any spy/government agency movie) where the heroes need to find one elusive thing, so they feed everything ever into the computer/connect to every corner of the interwebs, and then systematically narrow it down until *POOF*. Exactly what they wanted/needed was the only thing left, glowing miraculously back at them off their screen.

Yeah, I need a program like that.

I recently killed my wallet beyond the point of repair and was (extremely) reluctantly forced to go searching for a new one. I dislike shopping for wallets almost as much as I dislike shopping for purses. (Hence why my awsome husband actually *made* my current purse for me.) I feel like there's very few things I need a wallet to reliably do and yet none of those are things you can search by.

Why, I ask you, is there not a feature that allows you to require (in addition to RFID protectiveness, naturally) something as basic as ID slots that you can actually get your ID out of when you need it? Why is there not a feature that lets you require that you be able to fit your checkbook into it in order for it to show up on your hits list?

And why, in name of the Force, is there not an option to mass exclude things you will NEVER pay money for? Like hideous patterns in garish colors. Or wallets that have no place to put change. Or ones so bulky they weigh more than you do - before you put anything in them.

(Incidentally, I wished for something simliar last time I had to shop for shoes online. There are an obsene number of hideous red shoes in the world, and sifting through them all one google search at a time is slow and painful work.) 

Anyway, I finally found something and was delighted when it both shipped quickly and proved to be durable and just what I needed. But I'd still really like some of that magical search software...

Special Features

It turns out my truck has special features I didn't know about! I knew it was all kinds of equipped, of course, but I completely missed the fact that it has dedicated Puppacinno servers!

I've read that if you go to Starbucks and ask for a 'Puppacinno' they'll give you a small cup of whipped cream. We're not Starbucks people, but needed some terrible coffee while on the road and that was what there was, so we stopped. Eric actually had the presence of mind to remember to ask and the server did, in fact, offer up a cup of whipped cream.

Nenya turned her nose up at it ("that's not gravy!!"), but Arthas happily helped himself. Which is when I realized that there are actually cup holders in the back of the center console of my truck, perfectly positioned for happy border collies to nom on cups of whipped cream from the back seat.

The picture doesn't do the adorableness of the moment justice, but I thought I'd share anyway. Hope your week is off to a good start! 

Random Fun: Which Halloween Monster Are You?

Just for fun, a quick quiz to see what kind of spooky you do best.

(I got a witch... I'm okay with that. Cauldron! Bubble me up some cider!!)

: )

What's In A Name?

Just for fun, I thought I'd share this list of Puritan names I ran across recently. There was an ongoing conversation among Star Wars fans about how terrible some of the names in SW universe are. (Korkie Kryze and Talon Karrde both got mentioned more than once, just to give you an example.) In response, one of the participants offered the above list of actual names from various historical records that Puritans gave their children. While some of them are quite lovely, others were obviously from an era before anyone had to write their name in the tiny little lines/boxes that are now standard on any kind of official form... they also make you wonder what some of these poor little kids' nicknames were! 

The whole list is worth checking out, but here are my top three (cringe-inspiring) favorites:
(1) If-Christ-had- not-died-for- thee-thou-hadst- been-damned
(2) Helpless 
(3) Fly-fornication

And, just in case you thought horrible names were getting more rare in our 'enlightened' (not sci-fi) times, my sister texted me last week that there is a child at the school she works at whose name is 'Panera'...   

What's the worst name you ever saw/heard a person given? 

Sunk Cost

Have you ever had one of those weeks (months? years?) where the same idea or theme just keeps popping up? Different places, different ways, but defintitely recurring?

For months now, maybe even the whole of this year thus far, I've been seeing the Sunk Cost Fallacy come up over and over - in passing conversation, in choices friends and family have been grappling with... just kind of all over.

If you're not familiar with the term, a "sunk cost" is any investment - time, money, energy, emotional involvement - "that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered". [src] The year you invested in a work project that just got canceled. The weekends you dedicated to remodeling your house. The friendship you worked so hard to cultivate that's spiraling into bad territory.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy (SCF) - and related Escalation of Commitment Bias - occurs when people make decisions about their future based on "cumulative prior investment" rather than on the evidence, numbers, or other information they have about the realistic costs and benefits of a choice moving forward.

Two really simple examples from my professional life are the FDA/USDA's unwavering hardline position on promoting patently unhealthy diets and the US Department of Education's continued funding of a myriad of programs that we know don't work. In both cases, decades of research prove beyond doubt that what is being championed has not - and will not - serve the public good. But enough high-ranking people have so heavily invested their careers, reputations, and trillions of dollars of tax payer money into those faulty programs that the agencies continue to toe the line rather than acknowledge the good intentions, the new information, and the losses in between the way they'd need to to move on constructively. 

It's not always pride that prompts people to act from this bias; sometimes it's an aversion to/feeling of shame about waste. (I paid for these tickets, it'd be wasteful not to attend the event even though I really don't want to.) Sometimes its a fear of grappling with the grief, shame, or self-doubt that would accompany letting go. (If I let this go, it means owning up to having made a really bad call. How will I trust/respect myself after that?) Sometimes its just about not feeling up to taking the risk of trying something new. ("The devil you know is better than the devil you don't," or "just thinking about trying to figure out what I'd do instead if I gave this up is exhausting!")

And sometimes it's all just freaking complicated because this is life and sometimes it just is.

There isn't really a point this post, except to share my observations of a pattern I've been seeing more and more of lately, and to wonder (semi) publically if anyone is seeing the same patterns or aware of this trend. Is this a thing where you are right now? In your life, or the lives of people in your circle? Are you noticing other trends, instead? I'd love to hear about it, either way!

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

You know the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction"? It is SO true. (Anyone in the customer service business will swear to this.)

Thursday I read one of the craziest examples of this that I've seen in a long time, and it was so bizarrely great that I want to point it out here in case you, too, could use a little eyebrow-raising in your life (of the sort that doesn't also come with spiked stress levels).

Rhinestones, Madness, and Resurrected Corpses: The Love Story of Tony & Susan Alamo

Everything you need to know about this story before you read it can be summarized in the following lines: 

- "I’m watching them and it’s like a tennis match of horse crap." 

- ...they [got] married another couple of times to make sure it stuck."

- "Stricken with grief, [he] did what any heartbroken evangelist would do. He created his own fashion brand."

Seriously... go read it. Be entertained. Then go hug your significant other and thank them for not being a cult-leading Elvis wanna-be... just because.

Tenth Unikitty

At work, one of the other trainers (also a geek girl) and I convinced the managers a while back that we needed a "Shout Out Board" where we could leave thanks and positive feedback to other associates - especially those whom we never saw because we worked different shifts. (Nothing makes closers feel more appreciated after a rough night than a thank-you from an opener the next day recognizing their attention to detail in spite of being tired/frustrated/so.very.done.)

Being uber artistic, the other trainer decided to take pictures of each trainer, print them, and paste them onto magnets that we could stick next to whatever we wrote on the board. Which was fine, I explained, except that I don't show up on film. Given my disinterest in having a photo taken, she decided to make this for me instead based on conversations we'd had:

Do you recognize it?! It's UniKitty from The Lego Movie and the Tenth Doctor from Dr. Who!!

This is my litttle magnet, and it makes me unreasonably happy every time I see it. Hope you have something random and fun to make you happy today!