Posted in humor, Real Life, Shopping, stuff

Wiping

After the ice storm Saturday I was very aggressive about cleaning off my car. Very aggressive. Sunday, after all the stores had closed, Tom and Michael found a piece of the plastic part of the wiper blade frozen to the hood of my car. The holiday meant I couldn’t replace it and would have to bag out on my only plans for Christmas Day. Boo.

Yesterday I finally was able to get it replaced by the girl working at Auto Zone after I announced to her “I would like whatever is your very best wiper blade” like some kind of blade-needing royalty. (She put it on my car so fast wrote her into my will.)

It was so nice to leave the house! Buy floor cleaner! Have a guy explain how I can install my own replacement floor on top of my current one, which seems like more work than just using floor cleaner!

There are a few things in life that are worth paying any price to have, and both are for wiping: soft 2-ply toilet paper, and wiper blades that can handle New England winter road muck. Splurge and wipe well.

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Posted in stuff

Thanksgiving Sangria

I was asked to bring sangria for Thanksgiving. I have never made it, and don’t drink it. So I looked up recipes and picked and chose from the various recipes.

My sister was concerned because she thought Sangria was just wine and fruit with no extra rum added. I saw no recipes like that.

This stuff is hella potent straight and if you need to function at all, either cut the hell out of it with the ginger ale (or seltzer) or maybe avoid altogether.

The wine I used was not found in the merlot section of my local wine store. It was 2 aisles over with the box wines, pre-made sangria and other Boone’s Farm-level product. The bottle I bought was $6 for a magnum, so give you an idea of what we’re dealing with. If you use a regular wine, I saw burgundy suggested.

Jody’s Sangria

1 bottle (750ml) blackberry merlot

1 cup (give or take) Licor 43*

1 cup OJ

Sliced fruit**

Sugar to taste

Ginger ale

Mix up everything but the ginger ale. Add fruit an hour or so before serving. Keep it cold, and add ginger ale to each glass as you pour – 70/30ish was about the ratio I used. (It may have been 60/40.)

*Licor 43 is sweet and has botanicals (tastes of vanilla) so I used that instead of white rum and didn’t add sugar. You can reduce the amount of 43 for a less-strong Sangria.

**I soaked 1 each sliced plum, orange, lemon, lime and jarred cherries in spiced rum overnight, but I think that wasn’t needed. I’d probably not do lemon or lime next time, and soak in regular rum. (Apples and pears apparently soak up the alcohol more than cherries and plums.)

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Posted in Real Life, Shopping, stuff

Cup Wars

You know how you can go years without buying a new travel mug, and then then universe decides to introduce space age travel mug technology, so you find yourself buying not one but two new $25 mugs? Me too.

I didn’t set out to buy two. I could hardly justify one. We were at The Paper Store, the local Hallmark-affiliated chain of gift stores, in July because I wanted to look at their scarves. And there was a sign in the window saying it was launch day for the 2017 Hallmark ornaments but we’re going to focus on the scarves, okay?

The Christmas music playing in the store as I looked for a beach-y scarf almost drove me out, but damned if I don’t love the stuff in that store. Really, their buyer is basically my soulmate. So as I spent 15 minutes attempting to make it from the scarf section to the register, a display of travel mugs catches my eye. Keeps drinks cold for 9 hours! Keeps coffee hot for 3! What is this spaceman technology?? The Corkcicle is expensive for a travel mug and I don’t know if I need a new one. But my old one simply doesn’t give me the staying power these promise. Plus, I have a negative amount of self-control.

Later, a woman in an optometry office sold me on the lid of the Yeti travel mug, which is held by a magnet so easy to remove and clean. Done. Sign me up. I hate cleaning the slider part of travel mug lids.

So which one is better?

Interestingly, the Corkcicle kept coffee hotter longer, but the Yeti has a better lid (specifically the one with the magnetic close that you have to purchase separately.) The Yeti had better lid options – I’m not seeing replacement lids for sale for Corkcicle, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t available.

In the end, I kept the Corkcicle (and bought more) and gave the Yeti to my son. It’s still good, it just came in 2nd.

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Posted in Brain Dump, humor, lists, Real Life, stuff

We’ve Got Pebbles!

I was in the car for 14 of 36 hours this past weekend (took a jaunt to Philly and back for my son to do an audition). I talk a lot in the car, because I like to entertain myself that way, and it keeps the driver alert while driving everyone else in the car crazy.

We should have recorded the conversations – I’d have 75% of a podcast ready to publish. I didn’t start taking notes until Sunday, so missed stuff from Saturday.

Here, in no particular order, are things we discussed on the ride back. Feel free to work them into your own conversations.

– Why did the person who called “not it” for driving through NY get stuck driving through NY both ways? That would be me, for the record. I declare the lower level of the George Washington Bridge a big disappointment because it felt more like a tunnel than a bridge.

– Why are New Jersey drivers worse than any other group on the road? I have never seen so many crazy speeding lane-changers. Like violent swipes from one to another inches away from other cars.

– If you owned a bus company, would you only hire drivers willing to wear catheters so they could do the Boston to NYC route without stopping?

– Is a Lamborghini a practical car? (That was Michael’s claim. I don’t know how he defines practical but he couldn’t answer my “what do you do if you are grocery shopping” question. He said they get good gas mileage. Google doesn’t confirm the claim unless you think 12mpg city is “good.” Also, if you forget how to spell Lamborghini use “Lamb or ghini” as a hint. I don’t know if ghini is a thing.

– Made Tom Google the surgery-free weight loss balloon we saw advertised on a billboard. It’s a big balloon filled with saline. I can’t figure out how to insert a big saline filled balloon without surgery. Tom says the fill it in you. “How do they tie it?” Secretly, I now want to try this method of weight loss, but instead of a saline balloon maybe one with smuggled diamonds. Also, can I just swallow balloons from the toy store to save money?

– The My Brother My Brother and Me podcast makes a joke about Gallagher 1 and 2 and references G1 being a dick. Tom hadn’t heard this (!) so we Googled “Why is Gallagher a dick?” but then we have to exclude the Oasis brothers (also dicks) and Dick Gallagher, a piano player who is probably a dick “because his mom liked the name” to get just the stories about angry racist Watermelon Gallagher.

– Made Tom Google and read me the wiki for the Scarsdale Diet doctor murder. Also made him Google Molly Pitcher to verify our guesses about why they named a rest area after her. I had the correct era, but Michael actually knew a surprising amount about her.

– We talked about a story Michael had from the audition. He’d told people in line around him that you can suck on gummy bears to soothe your throat. The people behind him told him they’d Googled it because they thought he might be trying to sabotage the line. We tried to decide what he would have gained by knocking them out with bad advice when they weren’t directly auditioning against each other. Michael: “Go ahead, Google ‘sucking on a gummy bear’.”

Me: “I don’t have safe search on.”

– Tom and Michael declare the Grover Cleveland rest area on the NJ turnpike honors a Muppet. We ponder if there are human/muppet porn movies but do not search for any because there must be some. It takes at least 20 more miles before I realize they meant Grover the blue Monster and not a humanoid Muppet named Grover Cleveland. Wasn’t there a boy Muppet similarly named?

– What is Peter Pan doing in the picture on the back of Peter Pan busses? Michael proposes Flamenco dancing and I think a magic trick with a quick “look over there!” redirect. Would you know it was a picture of Peter Pan if it wasn’t on a Peter Pan bus? “It’s young Robin Hood!” We didn’t look up the history, but it isn’t clear why Peter Pan = bus transportation. I also wonder what they had to pay JM Barrie for the rights, and if it was worth it (as opposed to just making up a new, non-intellectual property name.)

– how much do we hate the car’s GPS? Her alternate route suggestions to avoid traffic generally add time. She also says “Traffic jam ahead” when there is either no traffic jam ahead, or when we are already in the middle of it. WE KNOW.  I named the GPS lady Suzy because the car is a Subaru. A frequent response to her announcements is “Shut the hell up, Suzy!” The biggest flaw is that she seems to treat many highway exits as anti-turns we must be warned to avoid, especially when there is an exit-only lane. I understand you don’t want people in a turn-only lane if they aren’t turning, but that feels like a thing the driver will handle: if you tell me to drive 30 miles to my next exit, I will spend thirty miles NOT taking every exit that comes along.

– How difficult would it be for a kitten to play ragtime on an upright piano? The song “Kitten on the Keys” feels misleading in this respect. I don’t think a kitten has the body mass to depress the keys that quickly. Tom realizes it’s a player piano or nickelodeon, not a piano. So it’s a REALLY misleading song title.

– Discussed the relative merits of Peter Tork as a singer.

– If you trip and fall and rip your arm open on a cruise ship mini golf course, how much of it is it your fault for not being able to lift your leg over the sides of the hole?

– Changed the rules for Spotify Search Roulette. Use Gong Show guidelines of 30 seconds per song, then anyone can say “skip.” Each rider gets two vetoes – you can each use one “skip veto” per song. If there is a second Skip request after you veto the first one, you have to skip! Related: while the songs are awful, the search term “auntie” results in the most interesting song titles and band names I’ve ever seen while playing this game.


14 hours driving to and from Philly plus an hour each way to see a concert Saturday night means we are all car seat-shaped and spent too much time in rest area bathrooms. But it was a good trip and I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to. (Unfortunately/fortunately, we won’t have to, at least not this time.)

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Posted in coolness, Podcast, stuff, The Internet

Is it time to Podcast Again?

I’m down to zero web hits a day. I learned there was a WordPress setting I’d never noticed that hid my site from search engines, which is kind of the opposite of what I want. I’d like to be the top hit for such classic search terms as

“Not Goonies, the other one” *

“How to cook dinosaur meat” and

“The best Jody in the universe”

I had a video podcast in 2008 that was wiped off the face of the earth when I stopped paying for the mac.com account that hosted the files. Apparently. It’s okay, because nobody needed to see me sitting on my bed talking about how many pairs of green pants I owned. [Newsflash: Too many! 2017 update: None at present!]

Maybe that’s a GOOD thing to podcast. Maybe that minutiae (or as we call it around here, “thought pebbles”) is what will help someone choose life. Chose to get up and fight the good fight. Make the donuts. I think anyone reading this because they wanted to know what the other movie was that wasn’t the Goonies (Shit, I don’t know, I didn’t even see that one. Are you thinking of Stand By Me? 12 Angry Men? Little Mermaid?) would also need a podcast by me because clearly I am going to improve your life.

I will have to get on that.

*I swear to God, this came up when I typed “not the goon”** in Google. The results are all about The Goonies. Not the other one.

**It’s complicated

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