I feel like a kid again

I am a product of the 70's, the same decade that produced disco and glam rock.  It was also the same decade as the great fuel crisis.

I don't remember the fuel crisis, so either it never hit Wisconsin, or I was just unaware of my father putting two gallons of gas into a car that got two miles to the gallon. 

However, on Sunday, I faced my own little fuel crisis: our local stations were all out of gas.  If I had gas in the car, this little tidbit wouldn't bother me at all.  As it was though, the dash had been announcing 'FUEL RANGE LOW' for over a day, and I really felt like I needed a cushion (having run out of gas before...pushing my car once was more than enough.)

I was able to eke out a gallon from the gas can at home, to buy me a day or two until the stations can restock.  And since it's been see-through-time hot the past few weeks, my lawn isn't growing, anyway.  However, driving on 'E' makes me edgy, and not in a good way (like KISS in a world of Bee Gees and Gloria Gaynor.)  Instead, I'm just anxious, waiting for the worst to happen (like a Bee Gees fan at a KISS concert.)

But I can just hope that when I can fill up again, the prices are closer to 1975 than 2011.  Ah, the blind optimism of youth.  And if I can't refill before I run out completely, I'll end up walking or riding my bike.

Just like I had to in the 70's.

I'm not witty enough to find a title that ties all this together

Just some random thoughts for the day and shameless links to my older stuff. I know you missed me, but it's proving to be a long busy week, and I just don't have much energy for this today, Wednesday being theme-free for me.

First, a hearty thank you to the men and women of our armed forces past and present who have given some, if not all, for this country. Enough said.
Second, I've started to load more blogginess to the Lori Mason Photography site (read: I've finally added something). Go. Look. Enjoy. It's not much yet, but it's certainly a start.
I just finished reading 'Red Alert' by Peter George. While it varies GREATLY from Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove', still a high-paced read, and really makes you think where we've come in the last 50 years.


Finally, here are a few things that amused me in the past week. First, for anyone who doesn't know, I train and support users of our Payroll/HR software. As much as I'd love this shirt, I don't think I could make it work, even on casual Friday.

What would you do?

Finally, I found this during my quest for images on last week's Fun Fact Friday.

I know I shouldn't find it amusing, but I do. But since God's put up with my sense of humor so far, I don't see this being the straw that breaks the camel's back. After all, I didn't make it, I just passed it along willy-nilly to the world population at large.

Speaking of 'willy-nilly', does anyone else wish they ran old 'Electric Company' reruns on Nick at Nite or some such show?

Oh, and I added a few new things to my page, including a little koi pond at the bottom of the page. If you clicky on it, you can feed the fishes. There's also a wine gadget that I added to the side, but I haven't figured out just how to make it work yet.

Finally: Remember, there's always time to submit a question to 'Ask The Nerdy Fat Guy'! You could be featured in a future column! Gain fame, fortune, notoriety!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled lives.

My relationship with staples

In this hectic, workaday world, I don't always get to the grocery store to buy a week's worth of healthy, delicious meals-in-the-making. Since we're trying to cut back, and it's far healthier not to eat restaurant food every day, I still enjoy cooking dinner at home. It's a stress-reliever for me.

Growing up in a household where my father grew up with very little, then learned to cook from the old German women at the YMCA camp before he went off to the military, our house was stocked to feed an army no matter when we last went grocery shopping. It might not have always been the most coherent meal, but there was never a shortage of meat, vegetables and carbs in the house.

Once I moved out on my own, I found myself buying large quantities of staples to hold me over between shopping trips. My freezer was full of different meats, and I had a staggering array of instant potatoes, canned corn, dried beans and Jell-o. And of course, since it was only me, sometimes a can of cold creamed corn was all I needed to hold me over.

Even now, I can look in my pantry, fridge and freezer and put together about a month's worth of meals. I am obsessed with pasta, so there are always at least seven or eight varieties, I think there are about 15 types right now including a few I bought at the Thai grocery. We have canned beans, both regular and baked, and dried beans of all sorts. Frozen fish and beef roasts, along with a bag of food service meatballs that can be nuked and go with anything, plus more beans, frozen. Dozens of spices, herbs and seasonings. Five jars of tomato sauce. Four boxes of broth. Three types of roasted peppers, two types of peanut butter and a partridge in a pear tree.

Okay, no partridge, but I do have a can of Tasty Brand Curry Mock Duck.

Because sometimes, I just need dinner to be easy.

What do you keep on hand for emergency dinners?

Feeling a Tad Deflated

I don't have a lot of notable childhood memories, the memories that make great stories for the grandkids or random people at the grocery store. I'm not repressing much anymore, at least not that I recall (two...three...four...)...

When I was young I had a few close friends, but sometimes they weren't around, and once I started getting bussed across the city for school, some of my friends just lived too far away to play with outside of school unless I wanted to take a three-transfer, two hour city bus ride. This meant that sometimes, I was relegated to playing with the scabby, smelly, dirty kid next door.

He was scaly to the point where I, being perpetually OCD about weird stuff like that, hated being around him. He needed to be scrubbed for an extended period with an SOS pad and bleach. Couple that with the fact that they were dangerous as a family, litigation-happy before it became a trend and an advertising boon for the local media, and my parents had numerous run-ins with them. However, Stosh had two older sisters, and as we discussed in a previous post, I've had crushes on girls since I was a wee child.

One day, Stosh's (or Stashew, depending on what his parents elected to call him that day) parents dragged him over to my house the day after we were climbing through weeds and running around in the alley to accuse me of burning him with cigarettes. We had, of course, found random butts in the alley, burned down to the fuzz of the filter and long-abandoned. However, nothing was lit, and I certainly wouldn't get close enough to him to touch him, so I have no idea how he got burned. I believe he got a beating for accusing me.
Cut to a few months later, when Stosh's parents had finally filled their entire yard with cars that no longer ran. Instead of trading in an old clunker for a new one, his parents just saved the old ones, big '70's Catalinas and Safaris and Country Squires, until the yard was a hazard for anyone and everyone. The one thing these cars had going for them were their tires, still in good shape and holding air.
...Until Stosh and I decided to let the air out of all of them, four or five cars worth.

Later that afternoon, we find Stosh and parents at my front porch again, this time accusing me of letting the air out of their tires, when they had just arranged for a junk yard to tow them all away (read as:)
How dare I?

Of course I, buoyed by my previous innocence in the face of my parents and his, claimed innocence again. Hey, it was true last time, and I was still, at ten years old, offended by the previous incendiary accusation, so I figured I deserved this one.

As such, Stosh spent the rest of his post-beating afternoon with our little bicycle pump, refilling all of the tires on those five-ton hulking bits of steel. I did, at one point, tell my parents that maybe, perhaps, I should go and help him, but since my parents wanted an explanation for my apparent feelings of guilt, I found it best just to drop the subject altogether.

There it is. Confession builds character, but immediate confession builds upper body strength. I feel better for having admitted that.

Good times.

The Original Badass

My dad, for all the shit he gave me as a kid, for as embarrassing as he chose to be (or as we thought he was), Dad was a badass.

Dad had a temper, consequently my life was spent looking for ways not to piss him off. He was given the wrong TV at a loading dock once, and when he tried to return it, threatened bodily harm to the clerk when he was told all sales were final. When the Pondarosa gave him a four-ounce sirloin and tried to pass it off as the King Cut, the scene was epic. The dialog that will always stick in my mind is the district manager asking my father "Now sir, please don't make a scene", to which Dad replied "I'll make a scene if I G**-D***ed well want to!" Now I itch to make a scene and dedicate each and every one to my Dad.

I cut myself or walk into things from time to time, and I try to just walk it off, but I wasn't always that way, and I'm sure it irked him horribly to have a sissy for a son. You'd walk up to my father with a cut, and he'd spit on it and tell you it was better. Hey, spit is antiseptic, right? Just like when your mother would lick that napkin to wipe your face, you sloppy drooler. Walk up to him and ask what he did, why he was bleeding profusely and his response would always be 'Am I? I didn't notice.'

Now he's on blood thinners, and even had to switch to an electric razor so he wouldn't bleed out in the bathroom in the morning.

The standout badass moment is something I'll refer to here as the 'Infamous 48 hours of punishing bloodiness', or IFEHPB. My father worked maintenance for most of my life, and one day at work, he and another guy were moving a ladder into place. The ladder slipped into my father's pocket and scratched him, but he thought nothing of it. It wasn't until 30 minutes later when he went for change for the soda machine and came out with a wet, bloody hand that he thought something might be amiss. Of course, the city being paranoid about such things sent him to the hospital, where he got a tetanus shot and stitches. Yes, that's right, Dad walked off a cut that required stitches.

Cut to dinner the following night. Dad was slicing something while dinner cooked, and he opened the cabinet to get a plate. A platter slid out of place and launched toward him, so his instinct said to put up his hands to catch. Had he put the knife down first, this probably wouldn't have been such a bad idea.

So Dad and I pile into the family truckster, him with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked kitchen towel, and me with my learner's permit, and we drive to the hospital. In a moment that made IFEHPB history, my father and his blood-soaked hand was still able to get out, disapprove of my parking and re-park the truck before going into the ER.

How badass is that?

***You should have seen the look on the ER attendant's face when my father proudly responded that he'd had a tetanus shot the day before.