That Hobbit Lady

Well, it is snowing right now…

And the cat is sitting in front of the fireplace…

Just another quiet night at home.

A little while ago my brother John sent me a link to this video, which is so true and so enjoyable and may make you think and maybe even tear up a little.  See what you think.

Russ and I are currently watching the late 1960’s TV show Here Come the Brides.  Back in the day, this was one of my favorite shows.  Mainly because I was so extremely infatuated with one of its young stars, Bobby Sherman.

Ahh… Bobby Sherman.  My very first love.
 
The funny thing is, as I’m watching the show now, more than forty years later, it’s not all about Bobby Sherman.  Yeah, he’s cute, and has really good hair, but mainly, I’m enjoying the show as a whole.  The storylines, and ALL the characters. 

I wondered when we started watching if this show would "stand the test of time."  Yeah, it’s hokey.  But it’s not dated.  Well, a little, but not so much that it’s distracting.  Maybe the fact that the show takes place in the 1860’s keeps it from being dated.  I mean, if we had to look at Neru jackets and go-go boots, it would really show it’s age!  (Think:  Laugh-In).  But the plaid flannel shirts of the logging crew, the petticoat skirts of the brides, and the wooden porches of all the "town’s" buildings are very appropriate.

Mostly, I’m amazed at how good the stories are, how fully-realized the characters.  I mean, this is TV, in the 1960’s.  I wasn’t expecting anything this good.  Yes, it stands the test of time, and then some.

If you ever get a chance to take a glance at Here Come the Brides, do yourself a favor.  It’s a pleasant trip down memory lane, in more ways than one.

Sometimes I wonder about my mind.  Maybe I’m spending too much time sitting at a desk.  Or maybe I’m just bored.  But recently, I found a really nice-looking paper clip and decided to hang on to it as a sort of "pet."

That’s my "pet," the large gold clip on the left.   I’ve had him since before Christmas.  The little pink plastic clip came in the mail today, and when I saw it, I thought, "Oh, how cute!"  and decided she could be a good friend for my pet clip.  So now the two of them are sitting together on my desk, in a secluded corner between my printer and verifone, right in front of the computer speaker.  They are in a place where I am not likely to accidentally pick them up and use them, and no one else should be coming into my office to borrow a paper clip.  Even if they did, it’s unlikely they would reach into this little corner,  when there are other, more conventional paper clips, in much more accessible locations on my desk.

I’ve told Russ about this.  He asked if I’d named the clips.  I haven’t.  He said "Well, then, that’s okay.  You’re not crazy."

I hope he’s right.

As you probably know by now, Mary is living here in Tuscaloosa, and we are both working at the University, so we often meet for lunch.  Mary has an interest in all things Japanese, and she’d been telling me about the Japanese lunch tradition of eating from a Bento Box.  Sounded interesting, so she bought some Bento boxes online, and today we had our first Bento Box lunches. 

This is what the Bento Box looks like from the outside…

And when you open it up…

Salad!  And fruit.  And under that, in the next level…

Rice and meat.  And those funny looking things are mushrooms that she got at the Asian Supermarket in Birmingham.

It was a yummy meal, especially the rice, which had a special sauce in that little bottle on the right,  Mary’s all for doing these Bento boxes in the traditional Japanese way, but I’m thinking you could put just about anything in them.  It’s great to have fun with food.

And now, since I’ve discovered this new way to post pics in my LJ which is really so easy and so convenient, one more, to show an improvement in my kitchen.  I recently strung some decorative lights around the kitchen window.

And in the evening, it would look more like this…

Pretty, no?  I’m a nut for novelty lighting.  I almost wish I had a bigger house, just so I would have more places to put all kinds of crazy lighting.

I’ve been trying to make an effort to eat better, healthier.  One of the things I know you should do is eat more beans, because they are full of protein and fiber, and no fat.  And I like beans.  So I decided I would try to be really, really healthy, and frugal as well, and buy dry beans and cook them.

Well.

First of all, I could never remember to soak them the night before.  And of course it would have to be on a weekend, because I don’t have TIME to cook beans during the week.  It takes so LONG!  And like I said, first of all you have to REMEMBER to soak them.  Which I simply could not do. 

So on Saturday morning,  finally I just went for the "quick" method, where you rinse them and boil them for a few minutes, then let them sit on the stove for an hour or so before cooking.  I did all that, then followed the cooking instructions.  They start you off with 2 – 2 1/2 hours.  Well, that was most assuredly not enough.  I kept cooking for three, then four hours.  FINALLY they started to soften up.  But they never really got as soft as the canned beans.  The outer shell was still a little hard, and the middle was very mushy.  It ended up being an all-day affair, and in the end, I had a less than satisfactory bean.  All in all, I would just have to say this did not work for me.

If I can ever remember to start soaking the beans on a Friday or Saturday night, when I am sure I can stay at home the next day for two, three or four hours, maybe I’ll try again, and see what happens.  But really…do I want to be a slave to a pot of beans?  It’s bad enough when you can’t go where you want to go and do what you want to do because the dryer is on.  Now I have to tailor my life around a pot of beans as well?

The beans I made were "okay."  They were not great.  They were not "delicious."  They certainly weren’t worth all the trouble.  So I think probably what I’ll do in the future is buy lots and lots of canned beans, and open the cans whenever I want to have beans.  

I like the taste and the texture of beans from the can.  Yeah, they can be a bit high in sodium, but I have no problem with rinsing them off.  It won’t remove all the sodium, but it will remove some.  And when all is said and done, I think it’s better to actually EAT some canned beans, than to NOT eat cooked beans, because you don’t have the time to make them, and even if you did, they don’t come out that good.

I think this is a good compromise.

Next time, I’ll talk about baking bread.

January is not my favorite month of the year.  January is really just about staying warm, staying well, and getting enough sleep. 

I’ve started trying to eat right, so let’s see how that goes.  Also taking vitamins.  Just bought some "sublingual" Vitamin B12, which you dissolve under the tongue.  It’s supposed to get abosrbed better/faster.  I’ll let you know if it works.

Also, been spending some time decorating the bedroom, may post a picture of it here, when it’s done.  What do you do with a giant blank wall?  Russ is so flexible.  He doesn’t really mind what we do with it, but he is not really fond of the idea of hanging a giant quilt.  He feels, and probably rightly so, that it will look too much like we’ve just hung a blanket on the wall.  Fair enough.  But I’ve got some other ideas that are just starting to come together.

We had some snow a couple of weeks back and I got a day off work for it.  No snow in the forecast at the moment, at least not for me, but Joey should be expecting some in Oklahoma City over the next few days.

Joey’s cat is named Batman.   How cool is that?

Today we took our monthly drive into Birmingham.  Mary came with us, and we visited an Asian Supermarket.  This place was HUGE and had every kind of crazy food, most of which I had never heard of before, and many things I could not even identify, because the labels were written in symbols rather than letters. 

Some of the foods I could identify were bottles of soy sauce.  But a quick question:  do we really need "extra salty" soy sauce?

There were several tanks of live fish, crabs, eels, etc., which apparently you could buy to take home to eat.  Do you buy them dead or alive?  I don’t know.  And maybe I don’t want to know.

There was a smaller room in the back of the store where they had lots of cookingware, plates, chopsticks, kitchenware, etc.  I really loved the colors on some of the plates, but we have more than enough plates, so I settled for buying a little set of small containers for sauces.

This worked perfectly for us tonight, when the dinner was chicken fingers and tater tots.  I’m thinking I might like to use these to try the old diet trick of "dipping" forkfuls of salad in dressing, rather than pouring the dressing over the salad.  I don’t know how well this is likely to work, but at least I’ll look good doing it.

I know I haven’t been keeping up here as well as I would like, and it’s pretty late now, so I’m not going to write a lot, but I have to share this little bit about Maru, the most amazing cat in the world.  He never fails to make me laugh.  And he’s so pretty, too!  There are a bunch of really funny clips of him doing all kinds of crazy things on You Tube, and here’s one of them.  Enjoy.

During this new year I’m going to be looking for new ways of eating healthy, either discovering new tricks, re-discovering things I already know, or inventing something altogether new.  I’m not sure which category this comes under, but yesterday I added the first thing into my new "bag of tricks."  Muschup.

Muschup is when you mix ketchup and mustard together to make a new condiment, that is both sweet and spicy.  It’s sort of orange, and I’ve christened it "Muschup."  I’m sure lots and lots of people have done this before me, but now I’ve mindfully added this to my "bag of tricks" as a new condiment which is, though incredibly high in sodium, at least competely fat-free.  And oh so tasty.

I’m wondering if it’s something you might want to use on a sandwich.  At the very least, it is a dip.