Saturday morning stuff

* As Adagio's personal tweets to me told me, my box of teas was sitting on my porch when I got home. I have already tried the Ditzy Doo (aka Derpy Hooves) tea. Amazingly, it does taste quite a bit like blueberry muffins. It also comes in a nifty tin with Derpy's butt symbol on the top, and the phrase "Ooops....my bad." On the side of the tin is a landscape scene from the cartoon series, and the phrase "Tea is Magic." The tin will be a good size in which to store pencils or double-pointed knitting needles or crochet hooks once I have used up all the tea. Everything about that makes me happy.

I'm sure Hasbro didn't authorize it but I guess they don't disapprove. (Wow. Can you imagine if DISNEY had had the Ponies as a property? Yipes.)

I also got an oolong tea. It's been too long since I had a good oolong in the rotation.

* I did brave the traffic yesterday afternoon. I had one idiot try to pull out in front of me (there are a few places where 69/75 isn't an official interstate, so there are side streets. This guy SAW me coming, waited, and then advanced. I tapped the horn and I guess he decided he couldn't intimidate me into slowing sharply down. (Well, I had someone almost on my tail, so slowing down just then would have been BAD)).

I took a quick run to JoAnn's and got the new Interweave Holiday issue, and also a skein of dark cranberry-red "Red Heart Soft" and a skein of orangish-yellow Wool-Ease. So eventually, a Big Mac will be mine. I do think I will use the Mr. Ed pattern for him, that idea amuses me.

* I also got to the Greenmarket. Oh how I love the Greenmarket. Oh how it is the reverse of the terrible things about some of the grocery stores here that I hate - the people are friendly, the other shoppers don't pull jerky maneuvers like blocking the aisles or having fights in Frozen Foods, the produce hasn't been abused,  paper sacks are the default (I think they'd prefer us to bring cloth sacks, but I don't always remember. I can always reuse the paper ones, and any way, you get two big paper sacks instead of a dozen flimsy plastic ones). They had the semi-local organic skim milk in stock this time, which meant I only had to go there. I also got a bunch more of the really good Macintosh apples like I had before. And a bag of Bob's Red Mill's whole-wheat pastry flour - I want to make cookies sometime in the near future and it occurred to me that since peanut butter sandwiches are good on whole wheat bread, wouldn't peanut-butter cookies made with at least part whole-wheat flour be good, too?

I even bought a frozen plank of cod. I don't tend to be a fish eater but I think I might like cod. I'm trying to expand my diet a little these days.

* Some time I am going to make those beans. It's supposed to be cooler next week so maybe Tuesday afternoon would be a good time. I think I'm going to use some of the chipotle pepper sauce I have on hand as a smoked-meat-flavor substitute - I find it works well on a lot of things and especially mixed with beans it does give the impression that there's bacon in there. I've taken to keeping a bottle of the Cholula brand on my table next to the vinegar cruet. How much my tastes have changed since I moved here....

* I watched the new McCracken/Faust cartoon effort last night - it's called Wander over Yonder. I don't know, my feelings are mixed - I liked the second of the two episodes ("The Egg") a lot more than the first. The cartoon features a shaggy little orange creature (Wander) and his horse/dragon/steed thingy (Sylvia, who was described as a "stallion" in the description given by my cable company, but her mannerisms and voice are more female, and of course Sylvia is a girl's name....). There's something slightly Dr. Seussish about the overall design and colors, and the action has a more frantic or hyper quality than the Ponies' does. (It's more like some of the old Harveytoons with perhaps a dash of Tex Avery thrown in).There's definitely a bit of throw-back to Foster's Home in the character design, too. I think I'll like it more as it progresses.

If I think of it when it's on, I'll probably watch the other episodes. (I really hope Disney didn't kill off Gravity Falls - that was a very different cartoon from this but it was one I enjoyed also. But there seem not to have been any new episodes recently and it seems to bounce around the schedule a lot. I hate it when channels keep changing their lineup; it's easier for me to say "That show I like is on at 7:30 on Fridays" instead of having to look it up).

And Cartoon Network has a new show called Uncle Grandpa. (Yeah, I'm not so sure about the genealogy in THAT family). My assessment after the first episode or two: it's a big stupid mish-mash and I'm not going to be watching it. I get that I'm not really the demographic that cartoons aim at, but....I enjoy an awful lot of cartoons. (Also, they are advertising it to death, which to me, usually means something stinks. Then again, they seem to have advertised "Regular Show" pretty heavily before it premiered and I wound up liking that)

*Just got the information on our insurance re-enrollment. Amazingly to me, what we have to pay is not going to change....the cost per person doesn't seem to have gone up much at all (7.45%, it looks like) and the university is going to absorb that. And our co-pays haven't changed. Wow. We're really lucky, I guess - I know lots of people who are scrambling to afford the increases in what they will have to pay.

I can get $250 off my deductible for next year if I take some online "health assessment survey." I am unsure about that....if it's going to lead me to be, for example, bombarded with flyers about weight-loss or something, I think I'd rather just pay the extra towards my deductible. My big health issues are the fact that I'm overweight (and my experience is, changing that would involve a degree of dieting and caloric restriction I'm completely unwilling to live with for the period of time it would require....essentially, the rest of my life. Being obsessive about sodium and vegetable servings is enough dietary obsession for me, thanks. And I know trying to restrict calories would make me cranky and crazy and obsessive in a way that would make me unpleasant to be around.), I have high blood pressure (which is under, I think, exemplary control - I am averaging about 120-130 systolic and somewhere between 65-75 diastolic. And part of that, I am sure, is my efforts in re: sodium avoidance and vegetable consumption). And I have allergies, which you kind of just have to live with, and there ain't no lifestyle modification (short of moving to the high desert) that is going to do much for them. 

So I don't know. Is perhaps having my space invaded on a regular basis with reminders of how I am a "failure" about my health (weight loss and hypertension control) worth $250 to me? Probably not. Now I have no idea if they would DO that, but other people I know working other places had that happen.