recipes must be followed to the letter

Today I learned how to make "salt rising bread." This is what the pioneer ladies used to make when they couldn't get yeast, and it has nothing to do with salt. According to the internet, the pioneer ladies liked to make a starter using cornmeal and maybe a potato or two in water, plus maybe a bunch of other stuff, and they kept their starters at exactly 110^o F (they apparently had super-accurate wood stove thermometers) for 8 to 10 hours. Then, if the starter worked, they could make some bread, but if it didn't, they threw it out and started over.

In the interests of not adding any more corn to my diet, I tried putting a starter made of only flour and water in a warm spot (the oven with the light on) for 8 to 10 hours and throwing it out when it didn't 'start.' Then I remembered that following directions when it comes to food was never my strong suit, and I made another starter that I set out on the counter until it started, dammit, and then I made bread.

Thus I will conclude that:

• Patience is a virtue;
• Having a high tolerance for junk on your counter can be a good thing;
• Following directions is only a useful skill if you are dealing with some aspects of government or attempting to get good grades in school.

In other news, the really, really sick lady watched five minutes of the Weather Channel today after not having a tolerable tv for 8 years. She seemed kind of unimpressed, but 5 minutes of tv is a huge step forward considering her usual entertainment is watching (a) the bugs outside her window, or (b) the ceiling. Also, the lady who has lived in her car for 25 years passed her driver's license eye test, so she's good to go for another 5 years, whether or not her car is.

It's been an exciting couple of days.

rear enders, tomatoes, and how to stay in shape

Today I learned that in Winnipeg, even as the cops were claiming that red-light cameras were improving driver behavior, accidents and resulting injuries went up about 60%. It appears that while the the cameras may have modified red-light running behavior, they don't do much about tailgater behavior.

In other news, by abusing tomatoes consistently for months, I finally got in trouble with them, at the height of this pollen season. I expect to get them back again by about August, just in time for mold season.

In yet other news, today I saw an ad on tv. It started out by mentioning how hard we all work to stay in shape, so I was expecting it to be for some kind of exercise equipment that made staying in shape easier. It was an ad for baked Lay's potato chips, so maybe bending your elbow is more strenuous than I thought.

fat, spam, and recycling

A few days ago I learned that the obesity epidemic can be blamed entirely on people eating too much. The model researchers used to predict the overall fatness of the US population based on national food consumption (and waste) predicted even more obesity, so people have apparently been exercising more. They found that to combat the extra calories, you'd have to walk an average adult an extra two hours per day and an average kid two and a half hours. The kids could instead lose one "fizzy drink" (350 calories) per day, but the grown-ups have to figure out how to ditch an extra 500 calories, which the article says is equivalent to a hamburger. (I think it must be a little hamburger.) (I don't know much about the caloric content of hamburgers.)

Then I got distracted, but somewhere in there I learned that Blogger's spam detector thinks this blog is a spam blog, so I am dutifully reporting it here just like all the other bloggers whose blogs have been 'detected.' Maybe I look like a pusher of non-shampoo hair cleaning products, but, honestly, I think the majority of the people who come to this blog are looking for some variant of 'shoplifting tools,' which I mentioned once in 2007.

In other illegal news, reusing a priority mail cardboard box is illegal even if you turn it inside out and no one will know except the recipient. I do not expect this information to generate much in the way of page visits.

things that'll kill me, personally

A couple of days ago, I went to the local EI doctor, where I learned that, having previously dealt with the life-and-death part of mycotoxicosis, now I should probably deal with a (relatively) minor mercury problem, and I should have kept taking various food-oil omega-3 supplements and vitamin E. (Apparently if you're an EI, vitamin E won't kill you, but it could help straighten out your hormones.) I also learned that there are some food-based supplements you can take for a case of candida, and this is where today's lesson comes in. If you have the ability to sniff foods to see if they'll make you sick, you should open up the freakin' supplement capsules and sniff the contents before you swallow them.

This has been another edition of Learning Things The Hard Way. Please visit our (totally imaginary) sponsor.

scoping out the drive-in options

Today I looked up the Wolverine movie on Rotten Tomatoes, where I learned that 5 out of 15 male reviewers liked it, but 3 out of 5 female reviewers liked it. From this unscientific sampling, I infer that Van Helsing would have gotten better reviews if Hugh Jackman had spent more time in it with his shirt off.

chemical burns, tvs, horror food, pit bull history, and masked hilarity

Today I learned that a bunch of sorority girls got chemical burns on a slip-and-slide lubricated with laundry detergent. Somehow this was supposed to raise money for firemen. Three things:

1. "He added, 'We're really fortunate that the women in Greek life on campus really made the event special.'"
2. When you've been out of college for a while and your only contact is articles like this, it makes you wonder how any college students survive long enough to graduate.
3. Laundry detergent will kill you, but not in a way I had considered.

Also,

• Old tvs are funny looking.
• A canned whole chicken could be used for a horror movie.
• Pit bulls as we know them today are not actually pit bulls. Real pit bulls, renamed Staffordshire terriers or American Staffordshire terriers around 1936, were medium-sized, perfectly good basic working dogs. The ones you hear about in the news today are essentially the puppy-mill products of a mixture of breeds, and I can expound for hours on the topic of badly-bred dogs. You can see them on the street if you look -- some of them, when they walk, look like they were assembled by Frankenstein, but without the bolts sticking out.

And now I have a good physical understanding of why dogs fuss at you when you crinkle paper around them, with an added hilarity bonus for those of us who have much too much experience wearing respirators.