RELEASE THE JUNK!

1 package artificially flavored vanilla instant pudding

2 cups milk

1 loaf wonder bread

1 tub cool whip, defrosted

1 tub chocolate frosting

Preparation:

Prepare instant pudding according to package directions, stir in tub of cool whip and set aside. For each eclair, use 1 slice wonder bread and spread a thin layer of pudding on top of slice, top with a second slice of wonder bread and then frost the top with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. Slice each eclair in half length wise. Makes enough servings for your guests to hate you for a week.

So, it’s the end of the year and I decided to go through and clear out some people from the friendlist on my mainstream profile. Rather than just “unfriend” these people I opted for blocking them. Some of them, it’s just easier to not see them online (now that I don’t even see them in real life) and while unsubscribed, whenever I’d hunt through my f-list for someone or go through the phone book on my phone to find someone they’d keep popping up. We don’t talk to each other, we don’t comment on facebook to each other, what purpose does it serve to have this clutter in my digital life?

That said, searching through the list multiple times to block about 8 people (that’s a pretty low number compared to the past) it was a little startling to keep scrolling past the 2 people I’m connected to who are no longer with us in this world. They appear in my phone book as well and sometimes it’s a little startling scrolling past them but I can’t bring myself to remove them. To remove them would be to forget them and forgetting them is not what I’m about. It’s a bit of paradoxical thinking on my part since when I bite it, all I want is a big party for the people who knew me and then I want to be erased from everyone’s collective memory. A bit selfish, I know, but it’s in many ways fitting to who I am. 

I have spent 2 years now ruling my financial life with an iron fist. Okay, so the fist has an iron core and has a healthy coating of the padding that Nerf toys are made of, but for the most part, I’ve been living well within my means and debts I’ve taken on in short term have been turned around in minimal amounts of time and financed under very good terms (0% interest for the most part.) 

That said, there’s the section of the budget that’s really hard to get a firm grip on: food, household supplies, pharmacy, personal care and in some cases, clothing. The problem is not spending too much on these items, it’s getting a firm handle on exactly how much is spent on a monthly basis in these categories.

The fly in the ointment is the dreaded “hypermarkets” of Wal*Mart and Target. Most of the stuff I get in those categories comes from one of these 2 places now that I’m out in the suburbs. While I’ve been haggling to get the food portion of that clump out by getting in the occasional trips to Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers and the clothing portion is very haphazzard (I can get just about anything I’d get at either Wal*Mart or Target in the “cheap everyday clothes” category at Sears for a slightly higher price) there are things that we get that we just need now and don’t have the energy and patience to run around to different stores to get. 

Remembering to set the receipts aside and then itemize them out in my budgeting software is a royal pain in the ass and in the rush of life some of these get lost in the shuffle and I end up with the dreaded “Shopping (other)” entry in my budgeting software and I have no idea how much was for each of the categories. It annoys me since I’d really like to know just how much we’re spending in each of those categories so I can factor out what a total budget looks like since we don’t have to buy a pair of pants, a jumbo size bottle of laundry detergent or face scrub every month. We do have to get milk, fruits and veggies, and other foodstuffs at least every other week.

The reason for this complaint is it’s just more convenient when I forget I’m running out of something to run to one of these places and grab it. Wal*Mart usually has the better prices but Target is closer to home. Wal*Mart is 24 hours so we can go when it’s less busy at 11pm but then we remember it’s dreadful since they shut down all but 2 registers and we spend as much time standing in line for checkout as we do shopping. 

I’d like to move the personal care and pharmacy category off the clump and just preplan and shop for things through drugstore.com and purchase 3 month supplies at a time so it becomes a quarterly number but for some things, Wal*Mart just has better prices.

These dreadful places are just not going to go away so I guess I’ll have to suck it up and live with the clump of “Shopping (other)” *gag*

So some mommy who is oh so PC and lovin’ the gays has a problem with a ManHunt ad for an app to find a casual hookup at 0 feet away. I don’t agree with her reasoning for wanting the billboards to come down but will give my own: put down your damn phone and socialize! I’ve watched a disturbing pattern over the past year as these kinds of apps catch on where people are spending more and more time cruising the people who are near them through their pictures on the phone rather than just looking with their own eyes. Rather than starting a conversation with someone across the bar by smiling, walking up…the classic eye fucking, etc. instead they start sending instant messages to each other.

At what point will the whole reason for going to a bar be to sit in a corner on your phone ogling the pictures of other people sitting around on their phones having conversations via IM rather than actually looking at the people around you and having verbal conversations???

That’s hooked up to my office calendar. It can have a little countdown to the next meeting cluster that’s color coded: green = enough time to grab food, yellow = enough time to lengthen my attention span (restroom and/or nicotine), red = you’re lucky if you have time to run and grab a glass of water. I should also color code the duration of meeting cluster in colors. green = 30 minutes or less, yellow = 1 hour or less, orange = less than 2 hours, red = dear fucking Chaos will the madness ever end???

I wish our conference line worked like our video conferences too. The video conferences have little pop ups and dings that let you know how much time you have left to wrap things up and then when you hit the time limit, it just drops the call. Shame we can’t set time limits on our voice conferences like that so it would just hang up on everyone once the time limit is reached! Even better if you could send a screeching alarm through the earpiece of someone who is rambling on for too long about nothing with the push of a button to shut them the hell up!

…make no fucking sense! I can get a round trip from JFK - LAX for 25,000 miles on a standard “saver” award. Using the Dynamic Air Awards that trip is 30,000 miles. For an LAX-SFO award, it’s 20,000 miles using Dynamic Air Awards vs. 25,000 using saver. That said, it makes no sense to blow 20,000 miles on such a short trip when the cash fare is really cheap and there’s lots of competition on the route just as it makes no sense to pay 5,000 more miles going cross country on a “Dynamic” award when you can easily get a saver award on the same route where it makes sense to sometimes use miles rather than cash. 

It’s also very confusing since you can only use “Dynamic” awards within the continental US. Granted they mention you can pay less miles than an anytime award which has no capacity limits compared to the saver awards but I’ve had no trouble finding saver awards in the past. I guess maybe I’m just not the target market since I use reward tickets for vacations and am flexible with dates and times to minimize the number of miles used. *shrug*

So lately the weather has been on the cool side but we’re still too lazy to cook and dining out gets to be tedious and expensive after a while (hence, we only do it once in a while now.) But there are many great decent uh, edible frozen entrees from the grocery store. 

I’ve been digging the Red Baron’s Pan Pastas lately since they’re just a little too much for the two of us (I’m not sure how a family of four is supposed to get fed from one of those trays) and it’s laid in a shallow layer in the tray in order to bake in about 28 minutes. The idea being “dinner in under half an hour” but they of course don’t factor in the 10 bloody minutes it takes for the oven to get up to 425 degrees. There’s 2 trays of the stuff in the freezer but rather than burn out on it, I went for the Stouffer’s Manicotti. Not sure what I’m thinking since I’ll be gone for just over a week and when I come back, the freezer will probably be empty of anything that doesn’t require any real cooking, but anyway…

I got the oven preheated to 350. I sliced through the plastic over the tray to vent just like it instructs on the box. I popped the tray in the oven on a cookie sheet and then I went to set the timer for the oven. Looking at the box it says bake for 67 1/2 minutes. 67 and 1/2??? What the fuck????? Not 67 or 68 but 67 1/2 minutes???? Not the usually vague 60-65 minutes like their smaller lasagne portions. But exactly 67 1/2 minutes is what they specify as the cook time.

Firstly, my oven timer doesn’t operate in 30 second increments which gets me wondering. What happens if you only bake it for 67 minutes? Will it still be raw somewhere in the middle without those extra 30 seconds of cook time? What if you set it to bake for 68 minutes? Will that just be 30 seconds too much and the whole thing will just scorch into creosote in the tray???

Does Stouffer’s have a hotline I can call with this questions? Would the response go something like, “oh, your timer doesn’t do 30 second increments and you’re too lazy to keep your eye on it to time it exactly? Well you can set it to either 67 or 68 minutes but pick which outcome you’re more comfortable with: food poisoning from undercooking or a pile of ashes from over baking. Thanks for calling Stouffer’s!”

So, I decided to live dangerously and I’ve set the timer for 68 minutes. I’ll warn everyone I know if I end up with cremated, inedible lumps in a burnt out, oven ready tray.

The first use of “drill baby drill” was not from a pro-life Alaskan snowbilly vice presidential candidate but was in fact a beta teaching women at the Department of Hatcheries and Conditioning how to use the contraceptive Malthusian Drill.