Thursday, May 05, 2016

Thursday morning things

* You know? It's a relief to be done with the "accounting" of what I watch for the Nielsen thing. I sealed the thing up this morning and put it in the mailbox and am glad to be done with it. I admit, when I sat down to flip on the tv, I found myself thinking, "Do you really want to do this? Because whatever you find that you think is remotely worth watching, you'll have to write it down."

That's also why I hated the "write down everything you eat" diet plan....and actually it worked TOO well on me (I'd skip eating and get cranky because I didn't want to record what I was eating).

But yeah. I realize I watch more "local" (mostly the OKC channel) news than I realized. That and cartoons and an occasional re-run of Untold Stories of the ER and not much else.

* We rescheduled the meal, except now instead of a dinner at a restaurant it's going to be a potluck lunch here. Which actually, IMHO, will work better - it's easier to talk around our breakroom table without noise from other diners or waiters gently hinting that they NEED the table, would we finish up? One of my colleagues is making lasagna and she makes excellent lasagna, and anyway, I like that better than Mexican food (and won't have to worry so much about "will this upset my digestion?" even though I seem pretty much back to normal). Someone else is baking a cake. I think it's my turn to bring paper plates and stuff like that.

* Have been reading some of the food-news with dismay: apparently Fresh Market, which is a lovely upscale grocery chain that I always enjoyed going into when I visited my parents, is failing, and is closing many of their stores. (I commented, bitterly, on Twitter that it seems that what our culture gets - and maybe deserves, right now - is a messy, loud, poorly-stocked wal-mart. And yes, I get that Fresh Market is where people with "privilege" shop and wal-mart is where the ordinary folks shop.) But does wal-mart - or at least my local one - HAVE to be so awful? It is loud. It is poorly kept-up. They have aisles that are largely blocked by pallets of "special deals" that are never anything I want.  And restocking is glacially slow so sometimes they don't have what I need for a week. And they don't pull expired dairy products so you have to read every single label of every thing. (When I was a kid, stores pulled expired stuff and you didn't have to even think about it). I wonder if the future is going to be a warehouse full of pallets, and we're all issued blunt box knives and told to open up and get what we need, and then scan it, and then bag it ourselves, and then pay.

I wish we had grocery delivery. I know wal-mart allegedly does the "web to curb" thing where you can order online and pick stuff up, but given how poorly staffed my local one is, I'm not even sure they do it.

(Again: the Albertson's we're supposed to get can't come fast enough. Though now that the "letting grocery stories sell wine" bill has apparently been shot down, I would not be surprised if they decided NOT to come here, after all. I know wine and liquor are a big part of restaurant profits and I suspect the same is true of groceries)

* Also reading about the recall of just about every frozen vegetable, because they're all processed in the same plant that had Listeria contamination. So I guess I throw everything in my freezer out? Some of the stuff was bought a month ago in Sherman and I don't have a receipt any more, so I guess I'm out all that money. What do people on more restricted budgets do? For that matter, what do people who use SNAP benefits do when there's a food recall? Are they able to get a replacement/reimbursement without a lot of effort, or are they just out of luck?

Again, as I bitterly commented on Twitter: maybe a steady diet of Little Debbie cakes isn't such an awful idea after all.

* And some nutjob/criminal in Ann Arbor allegedly sprayed "fresh food" bars with something, apparently he claims a mix of hand sanitizer and mouse poison. Ugh. (Again: I think I'm only going to eat stuff that's packaged up, in the future). People are AWFUL, you know? I'm old enough to remember the big Tylenol thing in 1982 and how now we have to fight our way into packages of ANYTHING.....and I used to think it was a depressing commentary on our culture but now, I don't know. Like I said: I don't think I'd buy stuff off a fresh food bar right now. (And anyway: sneeze guards aren't adequate protection if you have someone brewing a case of Norovirus picking through the food). (But then again: frozen vegetables are apparently not safe. You can't win....)

* I dunno. I think this is the normal post-semester let down/tiredness. Grading exams takes more out of a person than you realize. Also being out of a regular schedule, having your mealtimes disrupted (I truly, truly hate the 11 am to 1 pm exam slot: usually people are done a bit early but if they aren't - it's too early to eat a proper lunch BEFORE, and AFTER it's kind of too late. And you wind up doing stuff like eating junk - I ate an indifferent grocery-store cinnamon roll someone had brought in before yesterday's exam and felt kind of blah the rest of the morning). And I need a proper schedule to feel right, anyway.

And something has re-activated my allergies: after a couple weeks of feeling GREAT, now I'm back to needing more sleep/having puffy eyes/being congested/having the weird allergy dreams I have. (Last night: for some reason I was working in an opthamologic practice as a junior doctor/intern. For the first time I got sent in to take the history of a new patient. It was a baby. The parents were there, they had the baby in a high chair and had an iPad playing a very violent movie, which she was watching. The mother seemed more concerned about "where can I get a cup of coffee" and the dad was sitting over in the corner blowing huge clouds of vapor from an e-cigarette and ignoring the baby and when I finally managed to get one of them willing to talk, their complaint was that the baby punched and bit people, and I was sitting there thinking, "Can I tell them it's because they let her watch horrible movies and they don't pay attention to her?")

* Tonight is AAUW, with another round of "who is going to be our new president" and it's also a meal at a restaurant and I hope there's something my poor teeth (no hard crunchy food any more) and digestion can handle okay. (Maybe they will have a pasta dish; that's often a pretty safe bet....looked up the menu online. Mostly steaks, which I'm not really in the mood for right now, but they do have a maple glazed salmon that sounds good. And I can get a baked sweet potato instead of a salad....).

Saturday is graduation, luckily it's at 2 pm so I won't miss New Pony. (It's the little things like that that make life worthwhile). Of course, graduation at 2 pm means the day is horribly broken up - can't really do anything before it, can't really do anything after it. (If I weren't for graduation, I'd probably go antiquing to the stores I skipped last week because of the "fest").

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