Today is the bag pickup day for the Scouts food drive. Bags were distributed October 1-5. They’ll be picked up between 9:00 AM to noon. According to the Scouting for Food website,
On average, the Scouting for Food Drive typically collects over 93,387+ pounds of food from Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and its neighboring areas. This translates to over 77,823+ meals that will be served for those who need it most during the winter season.
I heard this on ‘da Friday Night Blues on KCCK 88.3 earlier. I took guitar lessons when I was a kid. I was real good at buzzing the strings. Not everybody can make the audience clap their hands to their ears and howl in pain. It’s a rare talent-thank goodness. You’re welcome.
I heard Iowa Blues legend Kevin B.F. Burt tonight. I’ll never be able to prove it, but I think he was D.J. for KCCK Friday Blues Show for a short time in the distant past. I’m pretty sure I listened to him. I can’t find that in his interviews anywhere, not even in the biggest one I could find. Sena saw him and his wife at an optometrist clinic a few years ago. He was trying to pick up a pair of eyeglasses. He was in a big hurry and kept saying he had to get to his gig. Sena even spoke to him, asking him if he was Kevin Burt. He very kindly confirmed it-but he was still in a hurry.
I’ve been playing an on-line version of the cribbage game called Cribbage Classic for a short while. This is a short review. I’m far from an expert. Sena and I play cribbage fairly often. We just played a set of 3 games not long ago and we both played very well, I thought. I had picked up a few pointers from Cribbage Classic, but didn’t do much better than I usually do. In fact, we usually play 2 or 3 games, the 3rd to break the tie in order to be the “best of the best of the best—sir!” I lost the 3rd game but had so much fun playing I didn’t mind.
Anyway, Cribbage Classic is a no-nonsense web-based cribbage game which teaches you not only the fundamentals of the game, but also analyses your play with respect to the two features over which you have a modicum of control: the discard to the crib and pegging. It critiques your discards and pegging play and it tracks your improvement (or lack thereof) over the number of games you play.
Cribbage Classic also has a discard analyzer, which allows you to look at large numbers of possible crib discards while the computer tells you the optimal discard for each hand.
There are 3 levels of play, Easy, Standard, and Pro. It allows you to count your hands manually and even play Muggins along with that. One of the most helpful features is the setting which warns you of suboptimal crib discards—and allows you to try again! There’s a hint button setting for all levels.
Best of all, it’s free! Ads are minimal. And if your internet service goes out, you could download the game from Microsoft Store, also for free. It gets only a 3-star rating, though. I guess that’s why I haven’t downloaded it. There are many more reviews (over 600 when I checked recently) for this game on line than the two other cribbage games I’ve downloaded. Many critics say it favors the computer opponent. That hasn’t been my impression so far from the on-line version, though I haven’t played at the Pro level.
The graphics are simple. There are no cute character opponents, no sounds, and the card and background selection options are not fancy. It’s advertised for Windows 10 and it works fine on my computer which has Windows 11.
I’ve tried fancy cribbage games and it seems I either win every game or lose all of them—which is not realistic. Cribbage Classic is realistic, meaning on average you’ll win about half the time. That means when I make crappy crib discards, I sometimes win in spite of them and when I make great discards using the hint button as a crutch, I sometimes lose anyway.
I make lousy crib discards so much, it’s a little embarrassing. On average, I make about 5 or more bad tosses to the discard pile every game. I guess some players would contest the computer suggestions. The points the computer says you lose on some discards can amount to only a couple of tenths of a point, which I think I can ignore.
I’ll consider trying the download version of Cribbage Classic and let you know if I think it’s really different from the web-based product. In the meantime, if you like cribbage, why not try Cribbage Classic on the web and let me know what you think?
We can’t believe the 3-rock weight option to help secure the drain tile grate failed last night already. This morning, the top rock ended up about two feet away down the slope of our yard. The other two rocks were tipped over into the landscaping rod.
What’s crazy about this is how the top rock got moved so far away from the grate. I think something or someone would have to pick it up and move it. It wouldn’t have taken much strength to tip the two other rocks.
Obviously, the three grate guards failed as well, probably because they were drinking on the job. They will have to go.
On the bright side, the grate was still attached, and the clamp was secure. I replaced two of the rocks on the grate and we’re hoping for the best for now. But we won’t be surprised if it’s a mess tomorrow.
This is an ongoing mystery which requires a critter cam now. We are ordering one today.
We’re hoping to catch the culprit on camera if the shenanigans are still occurring when it’s delivered, and we’re pretty sure they’ll continue. There’s no reason I can think of for any animal to mess with a drain grate. There’s no food in the drain and water is a lot easier to get in the wild.
And what kind of person would pull a prank like this?
You’re probably wondering why I don’t just secure the pipe and the grate with stout screws and forget it. There are two reasons. One is that I’m not convinced that would eliminate the problem.
The other is like Clark Griswold’s attitude in the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), expletives deleted:
“I think you’re all bleeped in the head. We’re ten hours from the bleeping fun park and you want to bail out. Well, I’ll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. You’re gonna have fun, and I’m gonna have fun… We’re all gonna have so much bleeping fun we’re gonna need plastic surgery to remove our bleeping smiles! You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of your bleeps! I must be crazy! I’m on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Holy bleep!”
This thing is too senseless and has been going on for too long for me to say, “Just screw it.” So, the drain tile grate mystery is now a quest. No, I don’t need an aspirin!
What I need is a guard I can depend on.
The secret of patience is to do something else in the meantime.
Croft M. Pentz
A few days ago, Sena noticed a noise in one of the sunroom window shade wand controls. She can hear noises I can’t hear, which is a good thing. She wondered if the wand battery needed recharging. We have 3 window shades like this and they came with a recharger that works the same way a cell phone recharger does. You plug the small end into the back of the wand which has control buttons for raising and lowering the shade. You plug the two-prong end into a regular electrical outlet.
We had never recharged them. The instructions said that when plugged into the charger the wand indicator light would shine red. When fully recharged, the light should turn green.
I waited one hour, then two hours. I checked the red light every few minutes or so. Finally, I quit looking and did other things. I replaced the refrigerator water filter. I purged the system. I emptied the ice bucket. I did a load of laundry. I vacuumed the carpet in the house. I exercised. I sat in mindfulness meditation. The light was still red. I checked it after 5 hours—still red. I finally just forgot about it.
About 6 hours later, I passed by the sunroom, glanced at the window and didn’t see the red light. I looked at the wand and couldn’t see the indicator light very well. I got the magnifying glass out and caught the light just right. It was green! Sena said the noise was gone.
I plugged in another window shade wand. The red light didn’t turn green until 8 hours later. I checked it several times. There was nothing to do but be patient.
I finally just did something else. I checked my blog site and was amazed to find a comment from a colleague, Dr. Ronald W. Pies, MD. He is according to a brief bio: professor emeritus of psychiatry and a lecturer on bioethics and humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York; a clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts; and editor in chief emeritus of Psychiatric Times™ (2007-2010). He is the author of several books. A collection of his works can be found on Amazon.
I had written a short shout-out blog post about the article he and Dr. George Dawson, MD had written and published on September 26, 2022 in Psychiatric Times, “Antidepressants Do Not Work by Numbing Emotions.”
What was unusual about Dr. Pies’ comment was that it actually turned up in my spam box! If I had not patiently waited a second to read it carefully, I would have automatically trashed it. That was close.
And I would have missed the golden opportunity to tell him that I consider both him and George my friends.
About a half hour before the wand control light turned the green, our cable TV and internet went out. Wow. I had been watching a TV show rerun, probably for the 100th time, so it was no great loss. There was the usual message you get when the service is out: Please wait while this channel is being restored kind of thing. You can’t do anything but just be patient. It was getting late in the evening and I usually don’t do much on the computer then.
A little later, after Sena had gone to bed, I thought of writing this post. I didn’t want to clack on the keyboard and wake her up, so I did something I haven’t done in years. I got pen and paper out and did some long-hand writing. I had skimmed some articles on the internet before it crashed about how reading and writing on paper were better for your brain than doing those on a computer.
It felt good to write. As I did in the distant past, I scribbled in the margins, drew arrows above lines and carets to corrections and notes. It was a mess—a partly satisfying mess.
I say “partly” because it was also not quite right. I didn’t try to type it that night or even the next day. In fact, I couldn’t post anything the following morning to my blog because the internet was still out. The cable TV came back sometime during the night. Obviously, there had been a service outage.
But because the internet was still out, I called the cable company. This was another exercise in patience. I don’t know if every other cable company puts those automated telephone recordings in front of you before you can reach an actual person. They are nuts.
Cable Company Voice (CCV): Hello, please hold on while I check your account. OK, there, I found it. Am I speaking with the owner of the account or Bozo the Clown?
Me: Nobody here but us bozos.
CCV: Great, how can I help you, Bozo?
Me: Was there a power outage in my area?
CCV: OK, I see you’re having a problem with your internet connection. I can help you with that. Are you in front of your computer now or on the roof of your house dancing the merengue?
Me: In front of my computer.
CCV: Great! Please unplug your modem and wait 3 millenia; then plug it into your toaster. This will reset the incoming signal. When you have completed this step, say “Continue.”
Me: Continue.
CCV: That was a rather quick 3 millenia. Which would you prefer: Going through another dozen more trouble-shooting steps with me or speak to an agent?
Me: Speak to an agent.
I finally got to an agent whose mere presence on the line seemed to lead to an immediate, magical restoration of our internet connection. When I specifically asked her if there had been a service outage, she said that, indeed, an outage in our area had occurred. She then arranged for an account credit to ensure we would not be charged for service during the time of the outage. Patience.
This post does not look much like the hand-written one. But waiting a while to let the thing simmer probably didn’t hurt.
Last night something removed our tile drain grate again! This time it wasn’t flipped. Something lifted the grate off the pipe and set it on the ground beside it. We were flabbergasted.
Recall that I thought I had secured the thing with a worm gear adjustable clamp on October 1, 2022. Up until that time, something (or someone) was flipping the grate upside down off the pipe every 2-3 days and lately every day.
I looked around and could not discern any animal tracks. The two crossed rods and thread over the grate were not disturbed. The worm gear clamp was still in place. I figured I had just not placed it close enough to the top of the grate and not screwed it down tightly enough.
So, I put the grate back on the pipe, pulled the clamp up so it covered the seam between the pipe and the grate better, and really cranked the screw tight enough so I could not move it at all.
Now we’re shopping for a critter cam. I favor the idea that a raccoon could be the culprit. Another outside possibility is a woodchuck. Both have fingers and are strong. This lid removal caper looks like it only happens at night. Sena checks it in the evening when she comes in from working out in the garden. That would tend to focus on the raccoon suspect since it’s nocturnal and the woodchuck is not.
Sena is going to get a brick or two to set on the grate and we will see what happens. Raccoons can lift 10-20 pounds, though. I’m thinking it’ll just move the bricks one at a time.
The other possibility is that the culprit might not be an animal. What if this is a kid playing games? There are not any kids in the neighborhood old enough to pull this off, though.
I’m pretty sure it’s not Bigfoot. The sod is loose and soft around the grate. Bigfoot would leave obvious tracks.
What about extraterrestrials? For example, some people think aliens are behind all the cattle mutilations. Others think it is some ultra-secret government agency running experiments (which have been going on for decades) to see how much nuclear radiation cows are absorbing from all the atomic fracking these bozos are doing to discover more fossil fuel energy resources underground all over the country. They cover their tracks to hide it from the public using the usual conspiracy tools—they just tell enough to investigators who get TV producers to make expose shows about it. They tend to air them in October to make you think this is just all about Halloween. I saw this show on TV last night.
Of course, if the government were doing that, there would be nobody living in the country by now because everybody would be dead from cancer from all the radiation.
But what if the extraterrestrials are trying to steal all the tile drain grates to use them as cooking grills to make barbecued chicken? The only problem is that aliens are so puny, they cannot do more than barely move them off the tile pipe. They get all out of breath and exhausted, which leads to them just giving up and going to a good BBQ joint like Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City.
Where was I? Oh, I need to hire a new guard for the grate now. Obviously the first two bozos were incompetent. The zombie was too busy eating his own armpits and the wolfman started pooping on the grate and clogging up the slots, because even though they may be hundreds of years old, you still cannot potty train them.
And the sword the wolfman carried got stuck in the grate slots, leading to a hernia, the surgery for which veterinarians charge a lot. I could get them from passing zombies, but they are touchy about their stuff.
So, the tile drain grate saga continues. Aren’t you glad?
Update: Sena bought 3 big rocks, the total weight of which might exceed 20 pounds. We set them on top of the grate. And I called the Temp Agency and hired 3 new guards to make sure that grate stays on. Depending on what history you believe, either good things come in threes—or bad things come in threes. We’re going to go with good things.
Sena cooked up some breaded catfish nuggets the other night. They were not May Reese’s hand-battered catfish made famous by John Heim aka Big Mo on KCCK radio 88.3 on the Big Mo Blues Show every Friday night—but they will do.
They’re packed with nitrates, as Big Mo always says.
We’ve never eaten catfish, so this was historic for us. We made a little tartar sauce using Miracle Whip (not mayo!), pickles, and chives. Sena made faces while placing the nuggets into the oil for frying.
I thought they were very tasty. Sena found several little bones in her nuggets, some of which she transferred to my plate. My pieces didn’t have any bones, but I found a few in one of the pieces she gave me. Chick Filet Polynesian sauce was good with catfish as well as tartar sauce. Tartar sauce does not contain cream of tartar, I finally found out. It’s just mayo-based sauce (if you don’t have Miracle Whip) and the name comes from the Tartar family. We don’t know them.
Sena really did want to try catfish. But we’ll never have catfish again. What with bones and a fishy smell (which I didn’t notice), we’ll be sticking with fish like salmon, perch, sole, haddock, and the occasional Leviathan which, incidentally, is mentioned in the Old Testament Bible in the Book of Amos. Usually, I just arm wrestle them until they surrender from exhaustion and obligingly collapse into a very large frying pan.
I found out that some people proclaim on the internet that catfish nuggets don’t have bones in them. We found out that’s not true. They are trimmings that aren’t big enough to sell as fillets, which are also said to be strips of boneless meat. Some people like to stretch the truth. Others need a polygraph test.
I don’t know if Big Mo would endorse catfish nuggets. They are breaded. I don’t know if they’re hand-battered. Evidently May Reese is not involved in their production and sale.
I suspect they might be packed with nitrates, but we ate all of them and there are no nuggets left for scientific testing.
We were walking the Terry Trueblood trail on October 3, 2022 during the balmy early autumn weather. Sena and I had been looking for a decent picture of Goldfinches all summer long and didn’t catch any.
Sena gently alerted me to a female Goldfinch foraging on a tree right next to the walkway. She was trying to snatch bugs out of the air, and her olive feathers flashed in the sun.
That was right next to Hilde DeBruyne’s orange steel sculpture titled “Wings.” How lucky can you get?
Well, it’s day 3 and the drain tile grate has not popped off yet. I secured it with a worm gear adjustable clamp on October 1, 2022.
I had to fire the little zombie I posted to guard it. He was drinking blood on the job, gambling on zombie cribbage with a gang of putrid corpses, and making threats to cancel Halloween based on bogus orders from Dracula.
I hired a wolfman from the temp agency who seems more reliable. He carries a sword although I’m not sure why. His teeth are huge—for such a tiny werewolf. Don’t call him “Tiny” to his face. He has an inferiority complex.
If you laugh at him, he’ll surely shred your shoestrings. Quick, say that three times really fast right now!
After several decades of making pancakes flatter than a pancake, Sena made light and fluffy pancakes this morning. What gives?
It turns out that baking soda vs baking powder is touted as a real game changer. She’s used baking soda for years and she was never satisfied with the outcome—although I want to be on record as having always gladly eaten them.
Today she added baking powder with pancake batter mix that, curiously, had baking soda in it which was clearly for leavening. I don’t know anything about cooking, but leavening is what makes things like pancakes light and fluffy. She also added an egg, which was not called for but which she did anyway.
However; for leavening, baking powder is evidently preferred over baking soda by cooks. But then again, you can use both. On the other hand, one reference on the web said you can make fluffy pancakes without baking powder. Eggs are another way to make pancakes fluffy. Even though the pancake batter mix Sena always uses has buttermilk in it, which is also needed to make acid which reacts with baking powder-her pancakes didn’t come alive until today.
Baking powder, according to the experts, is baking soda which is bicarbonate soda, a leavening agent by itself, but is also supercharged with other agents that maintain leavening. This can be a powdered acid like cream of tartar, which doesn’t react with dry sodium bicarbonate. Other agents that make the ingredient part of the label for baking powder apparently include a mini-chemistry lab store: sodium aluminum sulfate, calcium sulfate, and monocalcium phosphate. It also has cornstarch to maintain leavening.
So, if you don’t have baking powder you can combine baking soda with cream of tartar, or use self-rising flour, or egg whites.
What made the difference this time for Sena’s pancakes? Was it because she used the baking powder instead of baking soda, and adding the egg? It pays to read the box.
A comment about advertising: the pancake mix Sena uses says it’s “complete.” The ingredients relevant for leavening include baking soda, sodium aluminum sulfate, monocalcium phosphate, buttermilk powder, dried egg whites, egg yolk powder.
Sound familiar? That’s baking powder. OK, all that prompts me to ask the obvious question. If the mix essentially already has baking powder and the other leavening agents in it, why were Sena’s pancakes flat and chewy until today when she added baking soda? Not that I mind flat and chewy; I’ll pretty much eat anything, even my own cooking. Don’t report me to the public health authorities.
Obviously, extraterrestrials are involved.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 