Bits & bobs

I almost wrote "bits & boobs" but I caught myself in time. Sorry folks, it's not that type of blog.

I challenged myself to write on this blog twice a week & thus far I'm not doing so hot. My main problem seems to be that all my great ideas come to me when I'm nowhere near a computer - like laying (lying? hmm) in bed trying to fall asleep or driving somewhere or some other place that lacks keyboards. To be honest, they're not even great ideas, it's more like just ideas but it's always nice to add a pejorative, right? ... Ok, I just looked up pejorative to see if I used it correctly & no, I didn't. It turns out what I wanted to say was an antonym of pejorative, like something nice, which is the opposite of pejorative. And now I've written that word so many times it completely lacks all meaning. Moving on.

I think we should pass a law that makes lobbying illegal. Stop laughing! I'm serious. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way this country goes about the business of making laws & crafting budgets & whatever the heck else the legislative & executive branches of the government are supposed to do, like, say, legislate & execute. While I'm crafting laws to save our country, I'd also do away with interest groups in general. They're just another word for lobbyists. People who have money hire people to whisper their wants & desires in the ears of elected officials & people who don't have money - namely the other 90% of the population suffer for it.

Do we really need commercials telling us that cheese is a good thing or beef is for dinner or eggs are good this week? Was there really ever a danger of people not eating cheese? Or beef? In America? I so doubt it. But for some reason a group of like-minded individuals/producers of said products paid some ad group a bunch of money to come up with catchy slogans so that when someone goes shopping they buy corn or rice or alfafa or some other damn fool thing. Paid for by Association of Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, because only Wisconsin cheese is good for you, that other cheese from that other state is crap. You hear me, Vermont? Crap! So now we have an ad for Vermont Dairy Farmers touting their super awesome cheese & it just never stops. This is why I bought a TiVo all those years ago. So long commercials! Oh no! TV runs on commercials, let's just stick them at the end of the tv show in the bottom or right hand side of the screen. Ha, that'll teach 'em! Bastards.

Hmm, this got sort of rant-y. I didn't even get to talk about how much we need to find a new source of energy or find a way to take oil off the commodities market/exchange/whatsit so that every time some Middle Eastern country has a crisis or a revolution, (so, weekly) the price of oil doesn't skyrocket. US doesn't even get the majority of its oil from the Middle East. It comes from South America. Which means we have to keep old Crackers in Caracas (TM John Oliver from The Bugle), Hugo Chavez, happy so he won't threaten withholding oil from the US, like he does, weekly.

Heck, Shut the Government Down!

Would the government shutting down have been such a bad thing? Everyone is breathing such sighs of relief that we narrowly averted a shutdown but I think it might not have been the end of the world.

Sure, civilian employees would have gotten furloughed & yes, Congress would still get paid (which isn't right, In my humble opinion), but we could have figured out how "essential" some of our government offices really are. According to that bastion of accurate, reliable information known as Wikipedia, "[g]overnment employees who provide essential services, often referred to as "essential employees," are required to continue working." So federally run hospitals would still have their nurses & doctors, air traffic controllers would still be managing the airways, fire & police would still be doing whatever it is they do when not fighting fires & crime, respectively. (Sidebar: do you think police are paid too much or too little? I find lefties (politically, not writing-wise) think they don't get paid enough while righties (same) think they are vastly overpaid. I'm torn on the issue, but I don't think we need them controlling our traffic for $50/hour. )

I'm of the opinion that our government is a bloated, lumbering bureaucracy that has gotten too big to  successfully do much of anything well. & I say this as someone who currently receives unemployment compensation after losing my job last year (I love that expression, "losing my job", like I misplaced it & now can't find it - dang it, where did my job go? I left it right next to my keys). So I'm sure the government shutting down would not have a been a good thing for me personally or the millions of others collect/receive unemployment assistance. But looking at it objectively, I think a government shutdown would have been a fine way to determine how much of our enormous monolithic government is actually essential and what is so much pork.

I just wish Congress got furloughed as well because that is a group of useless blowhards only out to protect their seat & therefore their electorate. But that's a posting for another day. Feel free to comment & share your opinions.

These are a few of my favorite foods

My favorite foods are fairly pedestrian & boring. The joke is to blame my Irish heritage, but I'm not even a big fan of boiled dinners. I'm trying to expand my repertoire as my fiance has vastly different tastes than I do. But it's a struggle. I also suffered from a swollen gallbladder & gallstones for about 15 years so I did have a tendency to avoid foods that made my symptoms act up. Even now, sans gallbladder, I find that fast food irritates my stomach as do foods with lots of spices. My stomach is on the sensitive side.

It's been said that breakfast is the most important meal or the day & it's by far my favorite. I like ham, egg & cheese sandwiches, pancakes, or scrambled eggs & toast for breakfast when dining out. When eating at home, I tend towards cereal or if I'm feeling adventurous, eggs with a little ham & cheese to zazz them up (I rarely feel that adventurous. Mainly I don't want to clean dishes first thing in the morning). When I worked regularly (note the past tense), breakfast was an oatmeal bar or English muffin with jam. Of course, with these goes coffee & OJ at home or apple juice when out - I hate the watery OJ most restaurants serve.

Lunch & dinner are basically the same to me. I love salads but I'm invariably hungry sooner rather than later when I have a simple salad for a meal; it's a different story when I add tuna or grilled chicken, that keeps me fuller longer. I'm a big fan of making pizza on flat bread which is great because I can control the amount of toppings & keep them on the healthy side. I'd almost always rather have a grilled ham & cheese or a cheeseburger or salad & pizza over a steak, potato/rice & veg meal. I'm just not that into traditional dinner fare. I'm totally content having a couple of low fat hot dogs with some baked beans or rice rather than cooking some chicken or pork or what have you & coming up with appropriate side dishes.

I've become known for my "simple" meal plans & have been on the receiving end of countless recipes, tips & cookbooks & I do appreciate the thought behind them. But until we organize our kitchen, they are in cupboards or drawers & rarely see the light of day.

What are you favorite foods? What do you eat more often than not? What do you think you should eat more of?