Monday, February 04, 2013

Monday morning random

* I see they are fairly certain they have found the remains of Richard III. Two thoughts: Perhaps, in honor of this, that should be my next Shakespeare read (and I know right where my copy is). Also, supposedly - if the family tree that Ancestry. com spits out is accurate - I am very distantly related to him on my mother's side. (Of course, for some values of "distant" I could say "very distantly related to" everyone on Earth...)

(Edited to add, heh: "Henry Tudor said he'd build a car-park in Leicester. I said, 'over my dead body'" - Richard III)

* Random power outage at the Super Bowl? Welcome to my classroom/office building. (At least ours don't last 34 minutes, usually. Though my office computer's meltdown of a couple years ago was probably due to one too many sudden outages, despite the surge protector and backup battery....) At least no one was apparently hurt, and I heard that allegedly people resurrected The Wave (remember that?) to pass the time.

* On my Saturday trip, I went to Churchill's Pub again for lunch. I ordered chicken tikka masala, which I assumed would be lower in sodium. (I probably should have asked, but you know, being "that woman" gets awfully tiresome). It was clearly a pre-prepared sort of meal, so it probably wasn't. (My diastolic was higher - not by much, but higher - both Saturday and Sunday nights, so I guess that's where sodium affects me).

It was good but I don't think it's something I'd research recipes for to make myself; it tasted very strongly of turmeric.

* I did manage to get a birthday present ahead for my brother while I was down there.

* I also bought small valentine's day gifts to send to my parents. We used to, when I was a kid/young adult living at home, do small annual gifts - just something v. small and inexpensive, a token, but still, something. I hadn't done anything for a couple years because sometimes it's hard to find stuff that's not overly expensive but nice. I changed my mind when I was in the gourmet shop there and saw that they had raspberry chocolate jam - and that it was low enough in sugars that it would be okay for my dad to eat. So I bought a jar for him, and then at another shop, when I was buying a set of Vera Bradley decorated hairpins (they are printed with small flowers), I decided to buy a set for my mother as well.

* I did go to both quilt shops. At Quilt Asylum, I bought fabric from a new line called Architextures - prints based somewhat on architectural drawings. And I bought a pattern to make with it. And a bunch of print novelty fabrics (one is from the Aneela Hoey "Sherbet Pips" line - I wanted another quilt with that fabric in it - for a quilt called Taking Turns. The fabrics for that one are mostly red and aqua prints, and the sashing will be aqua. This was a pattern I found in a magazine but didn't have fabric in mind for yet (I have quilt magazines all over my quilt room, folded open to patterns I want to make. In some cases I have them with the fabric I want to use, in other cases, I don't have fabric for them yet).

I bought a few fat quarters at the second shop. It was my last stop of the day and by that time I was kind of tired and didn't see as much that inspired me.

* I didn't actually watch the Super Bowl....I flipped between the Puppy Bowl (I like it, but I could do without the little cameo shots of Turtleman or whoever and the other people that are on Animal Planet. I get that they want to advertise their other shows but I found those little cameos kind of intrusive) and a marathon of Untold Stories of the ER. (Yes, it's cheesy, but it can be amusing; like the naked guy who came in covered with cactus spines...I guess it was one of those "Hey, look what I can do" type of situations). It also contributes to my suspicion that common sense is kind of dead. (I don't mean the doctors and nurses; I mean some of the patients they get).

Well, one episode had a woman in who appeared to have some severe bleeding, and then lost her voice. It turned out she was a juicing advocate and had consumed a lot of beet juice. And one of the nurses commented that "If you eat too many beets, it can temporarily paralyze your vocal chords." Eeep! Beets are one of the relatively few vegetables I enjoy. And I kind of need my voice. Well, it turns out not to be quite so much. Apparently it's beet juice that does it, and only large quantities of it. (I wonder - beets being a chenopod, could it be oxalic acid doing it? I know other chenopod vegetables have oxalates, and beet greens do). Too many beets can also lead to tinted urine, but I guess I've never eaten enough at a time to notice that. (The woman in question who appeared to be bleeding from the rectum? It was beet juice, and she had also consumed too much fiber....)

But anyway: not cool to find out that one thing I like and can eat might do me harm in too great a quantity.

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