May your day of lurve be happier than this gaggle of adorable pandas (lookie here for article and more pics)

We are off to ski! See you on Monday
C

ROCK ON, MY SOUL SISTER!!!

Here are a few photos of Linus sitting on a bench, just for you.

I ran this idea by Earl, and while he liked it, he killed my buzz (so darn practical, that one!) citing things like “development costs” and “price per unit” and decided this wouldn’t be realistic for us to develop… so if any of my beloved readers would like to oversee this into fruition, please doso

Basically, I think it would be a great idea for someone to make a LARGE LCD screen which could mount on the wall in your kitchen, connect to the internet and display recipes which you can follow along while you cook. That way, you could pull up any recipe online (where there are zillions) and never have to deal with printing it out or the printed recipe getting covered in water, flour, oil, what have you as you toggle back between checking it and your cooking.

Ideally, the screen should be large and bright enough to read from the other side of the kitchen (while your hands are covered in say… chicken guts) so you can just glance over and see what temperature exactly you need to set the oven.   Also, the screen itself should be oil, water, grease and fire resistant.   The operative word here is “rugged,” so when inevitably you do get it gross from cooking, it’s an easy clean up.

Cookbooks are a pain to use in the kitchen- they fall all over the place (cookbook stand is on my xmas wish list, but cookbooks come in so many inconsistent shapes and sizes, how well really could any of them work?) and get wet, stained, flour on them, you end up breaking the spine by accident, etc etc. Also, as wonderful as they are for reading and inspiration, cookbooks are becoming a tad irrelevant with so many great varieties of recipes on the internet. I still adore cookbooks, and think they’re really fun to read, however trying to read and follow along with small print in a book without getting it gross while you’re cooking and your hands are all wet and dirty can be a challenge.

Right now if I find a recipe I like on the internet and am using it to cook with, I chose from the following options:

1. print it out on my own printer and bring that to the kitchen. Drawbacks to this: waste printer paper, required effort to print, 1 sheet of paper gets gross quickly and is hard to use more than once. If you really like the recipe and want to use it again, saving multiple sheets of separate paper can be disorganized and hard to reference in the future.
2. leave recipe on computer, run back and forth from kitchen to check it between steps. this is what I generally do, although it’s a bit annoying especially if you are cooking more than one thing at a time.
3. sometimes I do a bastardization of #2 and it involves me staying in the kitchen cooking and yelling across the apartment to Earl “HEY, REAL QUICK CAN YOU CHECK FOR ME ARE THESE ONIONS SUPPOSED TO BE MINCED OR CHOPPED.”  This method at least has the fun benefit of amusing me and bothering him while he’s trying to get work done. 

Hence- we need a big screen hanging on the wall with easy to see LARGE printing!

Think of your target markets- you could sell it to private homes AND industrial kitchens.  I’ll look forward to seeing this product on the market soon… and won’t even ask you to send me royalty checks.

ps- update on the car: it needed a new cam sensor and crank sensor… wasn’t TOO spendy but combined with the tow ended up setting us back $540 total.  Just another month in the life of a used Jeep Grand Cherokee owner, I suppose.  Probably getting time to put El Jefe out to pasture in a year or two, though in the meantime will try and eke as much use out of the vehicle as possible.  Picked her up from the shop yesterday (we really like our garage, btw if anyone in SF is looking for an honest shop that doesn’t rack up the price on unnecessary fixes) and she’s running fine now… which is great because I’ll need her to get to MY FIRST DAY OF WORK ON MONDAY AT MY NEW JOB!!!!!!!  whoooo

My schedule next week looks pretty good- I have 4 12s: Monday, Tues, Fri and Saturday.  No 24hr or 36hr shifts right away at this place- unlike my last EMT job.  Apparently they don’t want rookies taking the 24s.  Imo this is very smart and makes a lot of sense- the longer shifts can be REALLY overwhelming and physically demanding, especially if you aren’t used to it and run calls all night (which ALWAYS happened to us, plus my old place my shift had a standing 4:30am dialysis run for the same guy MWF, so even if we were back at station and had no calls around, say 1am, it was futile to try and catch any high quality ZZzzs because we knew we’d be heading out to pick him up 3:45am) – seems much more sane to let employees get used to the job first and then have them take on the longer shifts- heck, even a 12hr shift running calls all day and transporting heavy and/or very sick people is a bit of a shock for anyone coming from a cushy office environment.

Man I am so excited for my first day!!  I think I am going to resort to my old tricks and show up with a bunch of cookies to share with my new coworkers; hopefully they’ll provide social lubricant and help get things started off on the right foot.  Apparently I’m the newest hire by SIX MONTHS and the ONLY new hire right now… *gulp* … so looking like I’ll be stuck with the rookie moniker for a while [mentally prepares for a few months of licking boots].

Fuck my life.

So this happened tonight:

That was $140 (plus $20 tip) just to get the Jeep towed from where it broke down in SOMA to our garage in Cole Valley.

I’m sure it will be at least another $700 minimum to fix whyever it wouldn’t turn on.

Uuuugh. Need car to get to work. Need work to pay to fix car. Help, trapped in a Cartesian Circle of poverty and suck. FML.

Lucy gettng her eye drops

Our little clan has a history of crazy eye infections.

• Court: I’ve had cellulitis in my eye, conjunctivitis repeatedly and have a family history of graves disease.
• E: Has pigmentation sloughing off of the back of his cornea which is an early warning sign of glaucoma
• Lucy: (shown, above), had crazy eye issues this spring, which lead us to frequent one of the two Veterinary Ophthalmologists in NYC and spend thousands of dollars on her. Apparently she had an optic nerve which was releasing fluid into the back of her eye, which was making her vision cloudy. She was treated with shots and aggressive steroid treatment and ointments. She was NOT a happy kitty. You can see E, above, trying to give her the medication and how much she struggled. For an old, blind cat, she certainly had quiet a bit of spunk in her to try and fight when she did not want to take her eye drops!
• Linus: For the past two days he has been having green gunk oozing out of his eyeball. When I noticed it was green and not going away, I got worried and finally took him to the vet. He had also been scratching at that eye with his paw. The diagnosis was canine conjunctivitis which is apparently not contagious and could be the result of dust in his eye or picking it up at the dog park. He’s now on drops three times a day and also an eye-bath. They asked me if I wanted to put him in an Elizabethan Collar, but I declined… for now, he’s been pretty good about not pawing at himself. Poor guy. If he is continuing the scratching I’ll get one for him.