Adventures In Third Blog-iversaries
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Three years! I can’t believe I’ve been putting out a new article every Friday for three years. For those “friends” of mine who criticized me for “not being able to commit”…as a celebration of my three-year commitment, I present a list of things I like, in no particular order.
My all-time favorite comic strip:
It’s a WebComic called XKCD, with the subtitle: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. I confess, I’m not smart enough (okay, knowledgeable enough) to comprehend a lot of the science and math jokes…but the jokes I do get make me laugh. My absolute favorite entry, shown below, makes me laugh every time I look at it. I highly recommend this site.
UnWipe:
What? Yeah, that’s what it’s called. The UnWipe. Squeamish folk can skip this section but I’m here to tell you that this alternative to store-bought personal wipes is absolutely genius. Basically, it stores water in a sponge over a mesh, and instead of reaching for a wipe in the bathroom, you press your toilet paper very briefly to the mesh, and it both dampens the paper, and slightly corrugates the texture to make it more effective. You can travel with this device. If you are so inclined, you could carry it with you in your purse. Or pocket, if you are the sort of person who doesn’t carry a purse. It’s so clever
Below, you can see the separate layers of the device, as well as the instructions on the box. It doesn’t leak, it doesn’t smell, it doesn’t clog up your septic tank or city sewer system, and it works beautifully. What an ingenious thing!
Fancy pants:
In a previous blog post, I extolled the virtues of (and my love for) Amazon’s Veatzaer pants, of which I had two pairs at the time of writing. Now, I still love the two pairs of pants that I have. But shortly after I wrote that post, I ordered two more pairs in different colors but in the same size.
The pants that arrived were too small to fit me. I wondered if Amazon might have sent me the wrong size in error, so I checked. Nope, both labels showed the correct size…it just wasn’t the size of my original pants. Additionally, the fabric was different…both thinner and less soft. I was so disappointed…I sent both pairs back to Amazon. One really nice thing about Amazon is how easy they make it to return almost anything. I expect that at some point, I’ll find some appropriate fabric, take apart one of my pairs of pants, and use it as a pattern to make new ones. We shall see.
All of this is to say that I hadn’t bought any leisure pants from Amazon for awhile until I saw the MiniBee layered palazzo pants on Pinterest. I grabbed a pair immediately and I LOVE them. Amazon calls them capri pants, but on me, they are full-length. In addition to being extremely comfortable, they are also quite fashionable (well, I think so, anyway) and they are so cool and breezy. I’ve been pairing them with my Skye blouse on hot days and it’s lovely to feel both (relatively) cool and a bit stylish too. Did I mention that I love them?
Higgins is lost!
I saw this somewhere on the internet (YouTube, maybe?) and it makes me laugh every time I see it.
Shake, shake, shake your body…
Another recent purchase is a whole-body vibration plate. I bought the LifePro Waver, and I really like it! Basically, it’s a platform that you stand on that moves up-and-down and side-to-side. Even just standing on it requires your muscles to activate to help you keep your balance. Now at low speeds, it’s no challenge at all to stay balanced on it. It’s not like you’re going to get thrown off. I imagine it’s a little more challenging at higher speeds, but I’m unlikely to try that. There’s only so much shaking of my bones that I’m willing to tolerate.
Lots of claims are made about the benefits of using a vibration plate (which, for my own sanity, I’m going to shorten to VP), among them increased bone density, weight loss, and increased lymphatic drainage. And there have been studies on the subject. This particular YouTube video on how this might help osteopororis patients was informative.
Personally, I’m too new to the whole VP thing to address those questions about long-term benefits, particularly for conditions which I myself do not have. So I will just say this…using the VP make me feel good. I jump on it for 3 minutes in the morning right after I get up; I keep it on low speed and do some slow, careful stretching. Then I get on with my day. But after just 3 minutes on the thing, my whole body feels awake in the sort of way that it usually takes a couple hours of me moving around to achieve. Then later in the day, I get back on for 5-10 minutes and do things like squats and arm circles and half-situps, sometimes holding a weight when I do it. And I can tell you that doing a squat on the VP is MUCH harder than doing one standing on a non-moving surface. I can really feel how much harder my muscles are working.
The VP I have is solid and feels very well-made. I like it and I’m glad I bought it.
More internet humor:
Vanessa Nelson…
…is a fantasy author and I’ve been quite enjoying her work recently. The books of hers that I’ve read and enjoyed include the five-book series The Grey Gates, which I found I was unable to briefly summarize, so I’ll just include the little blurb off Amazon for the series: “If you like your fantasy mixed with a dose of mystery, a bit of magic, and a heroine who can hold her own, you will love this new series.” True fact.
Having enjoyed that series immensely, I immediately gobbled down the next one I found, which was the six-book series Ageless Mysteries. Again, I would have trouble summarizing this but any summary would destroy some of the delightful reveals anyway, so I don’t feel bad about my lack of synopsis. I’m just going to say, it’s awesome, and you should read it.
I next tried her six-book series The Hundred and I just couldn’t get into it. After a couple tries, I gave up. Life is short and there are lots of other books to read.
And finally, her Fractured Conclave series. I don’t know how many book will be in this series, because it’s not finished yet. I read the first three books in two days and then was completely dismayed to realize that I’d have to wait several months for the next book. It’s so good! Mystery, magic, mayhem, the triumph of the underdog…what’s not to like?
She does have other books/series…I’ll get to them eventually.
Don’t despair. Or maybe…Despair!
Despair, Inc. is a funny clever company that makes “demotivational” posters and cards and calendars featuring the sort of beautiful pictures you find on the walls of many businesses, intended to lift the spirits or generally inspire their employees…but with the little twist that the caption is anything but uplifting. In my old job, some of my co-workers and I spent many a hilarious hour perusing the offerings and speculating on whether we could smuggle a Despair poster in to work and use it to replace one of the banal offerings on the wall. We never did it, but it did pass the time. My friend Jane has a packet of these in card form and I get one from her every so often, which always makes my day. My all-time favorite poster is this one:
How not to:
And finally, a cautionary tale. There was a recent family birthday, where the requested dessert was chocolate cake with raspberry filling. This is a very common request in our family, and I usually bake the cake, fill it with seedless raspberry jam, and then frost it with chocolate buttercream. This time, I thought I could do a little better. I decided to fill the cake with raspberry curd. You know, like the better-known lemon curd, only with raspberries. Turns out, you can make curd out of almost any fruit. I do not have any pictures of the debacle that followed because I hadn’t been considering writing about it.
Honestly, I thought I followed the directions properly, but I could not get the curd to thicken. I eventually stopped cooking it and put it in the fridge, hoping that it would thicken as it cooled. And it did thicken a little bit, but nowhere near enough to prevent it running out from between the layers of a cake.
With time not on my side and no raspberry jam on hand, I needed to find a way to make it work. So I googled “how to thicken runny curd” and got several suggestions. One just said to cook it more until it was the desired thickness. Since I’d already cooked it about five times longer than the recipe instructed, I discarded that idea. Another option was to add more corn starch and then cook it some more. That also seemed iffy. The final suggestion was to dissolve some gelatin in water, then stir it into the curd and pop it back into the fridge, which I did.
And yes, it thickened. To the consistency of extremely firm jello. It was almost unspreadable when I was trying to spread it between the cake layers, and it had an odd consistency on the tongue, almost gritty, as if not all the gelatin had dissolved. Both those things were NOT GOOD. It was very annoying and frustrating.
I did finally manage to get the cake together but I’d opted to go “naked cake,” meaning no frosting on the sides of the cake. Frosting on the sides probably would have helped everything hold together but I didn’t have enough frosting for that. So I went with the original naked plan, but the slippery jello curd between the layers of the cake meant that the four layers wanted to slide every direction (mostly away from one another, like tectonic plates during an earthquake). I put it in the fridge, hoping that it would firm up and be stable enough to transport. But when I arrived the party location, the layers of cake were everywhere.
My favorite sister-in-law was kind enough not to laugh at me as we jammed the layers back into place and put it in her fridge. When it came time to cut the cake into slices, each slice ended up in four distinct pieces on every plate. Looked appalling. But…it tasted good. The sharpness of the raspberry flavor came through much more than it did when I used jam. So, that’s something, I guess…
The lesson: do not try to thicken runny curd with gelatin.
