Clock Adjustment

Every time we go on or off of Daylight Saving Time, it takes me awhile to get around to changing the clock on the stereo in my van. For one thing, I can never remember how to do it without the manual. Fortunately, I am smart enough to keep the manual handy in the crate between my front seats. Not only that, but it's always open to the page with the clock setting instructions clearly marked for my easy usage.

Yesterday, I wanted to be sure I got my clock adjusted because it gets rather annoying to have the wrong time on it. I pulled the manual out and handed it to my son, so I'd have a reminder to set it when I got home. Yeah, right. I carried the manual into the house with my purse and other stuff. Once I realized what I'd done, I went back out to the van, turned the key on, popped out a CD for my son, and set my clock.

Finally. The correct time in my van.

Fast forward almost 24 hours to early this afternoon. It's time to leave and my keys aren't hanging on their hook. While I may be inconsistent about a lot of things, I'm pretty sure my keys make it onto the hook about 95% of the time or more. But they weren't there. I checked my purse. Nope. The buffet, counter, and table. Nope. I couldn't possibly have left them in the van. Could I?

I took a walk outside and looked in the van and sure enough - they were right there in the steering column. Not good.

Then I also noticed that they didn't seem to be at the correct angle. It appeared that perhaps the keys were still turned on, based upon that angle. For nearly 24 hours. Also not good.

Yes, I do have an extra key - on my husband's key ring. Since he does mobile RV service, there are a lot of places he could be. Fortunately I knew where he was. Unfortunately, he was around 50 miles away. For pretty much the entire day. Third not good.

Thanks to my mom, I was able to get where I needed to go, and back home again. And then John got home around dinner time. They keys were still right where I left them. Sadly, I was right about the angle - the keys were on. The battery was dead as it could be.



I am so grateful that I have a handy husband with LCTS {Lots of Cool Tools and Stuff}. He promptly pulled out the battery charger and hooked me up.

My hero!

PSA - Postage Increase

Apparently, I've been living under a rock. I think that sometime back I heard that postage rates would increase this spring, but figured I'd hear more about it later. I was just over at the US Postal Service site and discovered that first class postage on a 1-ounce or lighter envelope went up to 42 cents.


On May 12th.


A full THIRTEEN days ago.


Where was I?!?

While not a lot, I have mailed some things in that time. Will they be delivered? Will I get them back weeks later for lack of postage? Will our landlords think we're shirking our rent payment duties? Good grief.

Maybe the one other person on the planet who was unaware of this will read my blog and feel better informed. Maybe that person won't make the mistake of sending mail with the insufficient postage (hope they don't start charging NSF fees for postage blunders). If not, the rest of you can just chuckle as you witness yet another episode in the Dork Jeans series. Ha! Ha!

Blue

All my Friday morning pictures had a blue tinge to them and I wasn't sure why that was happening. I thought, maybe it had something to do with the morning light and the snow and . . . oh, I don't know, maybe the atmosphere. All right, it's not at all scientific - I was just making up stuff.

Saturday, I was shooting a few mountain pix and noticed that they also had a blue tinge. It was slow in coming, but the proverbial bulb finally lit up. MAYBE I had the lighting on my camera set incorrectly.

Sure enough - it was set for fluorescent lighting. The dork jeans strike again.

Gee, amazing what the correct setting will do for you!

Cooking in Bulk, part 1

They're everywhere - those cookbooks that tell you how to cook many meals at once, storing them in the freezer, so you're ready to roll when it comes time to serve up a delicious and nutritious dinner. The super-organized part of me loves this idea. The lazy, slacker part of me thinks she'd rather do something else with that prep time.

But lately, courtesy of my dork jeans, I've begun to perform Inadvertent Bulk Cooking (IBC).

It was a cold and snowy night. A soup night, if ever there was one. I decided to prepare a big pot of Chicken Enchilada Soup, a family favorite around here.

While I do make a lot of meals from scratch, this is one where I use a Homemade Gourmet mix. We can have piping hot, yummy soup in about half an hour. For those of you who aren't familiar with HG, some of their products come in a "pantry staple." That means a container with enough of the mix to make multiple batches. It's economic and efficient. We like that in our food . . . or food mixes.

So . . . back to the soup. I had already poured the tomatoes, milk, and water into a big pot. It was time to add the soup mix. I opened my pantry staple package. Seven tablespoons were to go into the pot; the remainder in the storage container. Small problem. I was talking on the phone (with my handy-dandy headset), and inadvertently dumped the ENTIRE PACKAGE of soup mix into the pan!!!!

Side note: there's enough mix in one of those pantry staples to make SEVEN BATCHES OF SOUP! Not just a "small, might-feed-four-people" batch of soup. A nice, big batch of soup.

Since scooping dry soup mix back out of a pot of tomatoes, milk, and water wasn't viable - particularly because I had NO idea how I'd be able to tell if I had left just 7 tablespoons in there . . . and it was mostly wet at this point anyway . . . I decided I'd have to fix ALL SEVEN BATCHES!

Only problem? I didn't have a pot big enough to handle seven large batches of soup (hmm, the bathtub might've been accomodating). Nor enough tomatoes . . . or milk. I did have enough water. Small consolation.

Okay, I did some quick calculations and decided to make condensed soup. With the calculator in the other room, the math didn't work so well with sevens, so I changed it to six batches. I added some more water, tomatoes and/or tomato sauce and/or tomato paste, and brought it to a boil. Then I carefully measured it out into six containers. One went back into the potn, along with some cooked chicken to become our tasty dinner. The other five cooled, were poured into freezer bags, and frozen - nice & flat so they store well. I also wrote appropriate instructions for what else would be added at a future cooking time. You know, in the off-chance that I couldn't remember the specific modified recipe information.

There we go - five batches of condensed chicken enchilada soup in my freezer, ready and willing to go, when called upon for a cold and snowy night's dinner. IBC meal #1.

Dork Jeans

Okay, really it should be Dork Genes, but everytime I say it, it sounds like I'm referring to pants constructed of blue denim. So I'll call them Dork Jeans.

My mom called me the other day to ask if I wanted to know where I got my Dork Jeans from. Well, I pretty much knew the answer to that (they're inherited), but I'm always up for a good DJ story! No, I'm not going to rat out my mom - she can start her own blog and tell her own tales of dorkiness. However, I can certainly tell all the dorky accounts of my own doing, should I be so inclined.

What cracks me up is that I'm really not that ditzy, dorky, etc. I'm a bit silly, for sure, but I still come up with some doozies.

DJ #1: A few years back, hubby installed a nice, new (FREE!) microwave-range hood above the stove. It's quite wide, but not as deep from front to back as the old (really old) microwave we'd had since 1987. I have a couple of those nifty little Micro-Cookers from P*mpered Ch*f that I just love. I put it on the center of the turntable in the microwave and realized that the handle hit the front or back of the microwave. I promptly complained mentioned to hubby that I would no longer be able to use this handy little product. He gave me a very funny look, walked over and moved the cooker so it was off-center on the turntable, and gave me a look of voilà! Good grief, guess I put the Dork Jeans on that morning!

DJ #2: I recently went to Mom's house, along with my cool new Super Scr*bble Deluxe to have some lexeme fun. The board folds in half (it's hard plastic) and when I opened it, her table cloth was caught in the middle. However, instead of saying that the board had pinched her table cloth, I said that I had pinched her clothes pin! Now where did that come from?!? Like I can't tell a clothes pin from a table cloth. Yep, wearing those Dork Jeans again!

As more of these stories creep back into my conscious brain, I'll share them (or not, when they're just downright TOO embarrassing). One good thing about having Dork Jeans is that I'm almost never at a loss for a good laugh, and it's usually at my own expense. Paid in full by my ancestral Dork Genes.