meeting, rant

Today I Rant For Tomorrow I …

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Today I wasted yet another two hours of my life sitting through a meeting of a committee I got volunteered to serve on. It seems that in spite of having a paid facilitator, we run in circles week after week. Mostly because there are too many players with personal skin in the game, all trying to act like they don’t. I just wish that we could somehow force everyone to stand up and declare their real interests so we could move on to solving the problem at hand without all the posturing and protectionism and hidden pushing and shoving. Oh well, probably much too sane and logical to have happen in a room full of pols and idiots …

Then to make matters worse, the weekly meetings have been moved to a room in a historically restored court house.

 The meeting room has 18 foot high tin plate ceilings,

hardwood floors,

and absolutely no sound absorption. So the meeting is like sitting in a echo chamber with a jet revving for take off at one end. No one can hear anyone else and that includes the recording system for making the official notes. And so it goes …

At least there was a football game on the TV when I finally got home.

odd thoughts, weather

Odd Thoughts

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Yesterday I caught a bit of dialog in a teaser for a TV show that made my day.

“You’re building a time machine. Right? So what’s the rush?”

Talk about an amusingly deep thought! If you ever succeed in building a time machine, you can always go back to any earlier time with it so that if you have ever built it you already have it now.  If you don’t succeed, it will make no difference and you will have no machine ever. I always dreamt of having one of these

ever since I read H. G. Well’s novella “The Time Machine” in my childhood. I still wouldn’t mind having one, but by the above logic I don’t have a snowball’s chance in ….

In other completely useless information, it is forecast to get up to 60 degrees today and have highs in the 50s until … wait for it … next week around Thanksgiving when the highs will be around freezing. Sort of figures. Wait until the time when everyone has time to wonder about outdoors and then make it turn cool. Oh well.

Time to get on with it. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

food, taste

Do You …

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Do you ever have a particular taste in mind when you decide to fix or order a dish only to have the actual dish not live up (or down) to your imagination? I do.

Sometimes I come across a recipe and think “Boy, that sure sounds good.” But many times the actual taste bears little resemblance to my mental picture of how it should/would taste. The same thing happens from time to time with old favorites. Then I always wonder if I have made the dish wrong. After all, I seldom follow a recipe to the letter. I am more a bit of this and a dash of that type of cook.

The other day the topic came up in a discussion with mom, since it happens to her as well. Her thought was that it might be related to aging and the associated changes in taste abilities and preferences. My thought was that it might be reflective of the different nutritional needs at the time. After all, when I was a teenage football player, every bit of food in the universe in any combination looked good and tasted good. Now? Not so much. We left the topic hanging that so we could go eat. {*grin*}

I was also reminded of how taste and cravings for certain foods can change due to other environmental factors. For example, one of the drugs I took or a couple of years to treat a chronic condition left me with an insane desire for grapefruit. Not citrus fruit, but grapefruit specifically.

I’d peel and eat a couple of grapefruit a day and they tasted absolutely sublime. Then I changed to a different drug regimen and the desire for grapefruit faded. (Not to mention that they taste no where near as good as I remember them from the drug period.)

Now I am left to wonder if my current fascination with scrambled eggs

drizzled with Tabasco Chipotle Sauce

is an artifact of my current drug regimen, a development of aging taste buds, or is just a passing fad for my taste buds. After all, I used to not care for scrambled eggs in any form what-so-ever. That is certainly not the case now.

So what foods do you find you crave? And which ones no longer live up to the taste in your imagination?

drear, fall, weather

The Drear and the Darkness

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The last couple of days have been dull and dreary with clouds and occasional skiffs of snow, highs in the low 40s and lows in the teens. Typical fall weather for around here. Because it has been staying above freezing for the daylight hours, the snow is now mostly gone and we are back to the dull drear of fall in the period once the leaves have fallen. There is still a hint of green in the grass and the sagebrush is turning brown, but that too will soon fade. Somewhat like this:

(Picture from UC Collection)

L went skiing for her inaugural run of the year yesterday. That means she was both happy and stiff and sore last night when I talked to her. (Ibuprofen was invented for aging baby boomers. {*grin*}) The interesting point was that it was blowing and snowing up there – pretty much the standard weather in the mountains from now until spring. Right now, it is both colder and snowier in the mountains than out here on the plains. L proclaims that it is now winter in the mountains in spite of what the calendar says. At least it can look pretty:

(The glow of Breckenridge in winter.)

Which brings me to one of the things I dislike about this season – the decreasing amount of daylight and advancing time of darkness as we approach the winter solstice on December 21. Sunset is already at 4:35pm and will get progressively earlier as time rolls on. I really dislike the coming weeks when it is dark by 3:30 – it is depressing. It is even worse in the mountains where the valley walls cut the sunlight off even earlier. I often wonder how people who live at far northern (or southern for that matter) latitudes handle it. Days with no hours of sunlight seem like they would be really hard to endure. On the other hand, the shortening days seem to be ideal weather for soup. {*grin*}

Time to get on with real work.

fall, snow, weather

Hip Hip Hooray for Fall

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It was close to 80 degrees this weekend. Truly unseasonable weather for this region. L loved it since the ski areas in her neck of the woods are already open or will open this week. Coming home to nice warm temps in the upper 70’s is a bit like taking a tropical island trip in the deepest darkest days of winter – something to be enjoyed and treasured.

With the oddity of our balmy October and November, a major topic of discussion has been “when will fall really arrive?” Last year we had several snow falls in October and a full on blizzard in late October. This year? Not! No snow and no temperatures conducive to snow. Even some debate with myself as to whether I was wise to have shut off the water to the sprinkler system a few weeks ago to avoid freezing pipes.

But this morning! Ah this morning. What did I find when I let Molly out for her morning frolic? This:

Fall has well and truly arrived at long last. Nothing whispers fall better than a soggy, just below freezing, huge flake, dump of wet and wild snow.  I love this kind of weather!

The sky is grey and filled with white flakes, the trees and wires are coated in a rime of lovely white, but it is still warm enough that the streets and sidewalks are mostly clear. In fact, I took these pictures moseying around outside in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.

Hip Hip Hooray for Fall!

Things Done Right