"a bunch of people claiming to be "green" chatting away on their computers made of plastics. no, it was the person who complained about the SUV's in the bank drive through while he/she was waiting in the drive through line. Or is it the people who don't realize that trees can be grown as a crop, much like corn, only it takes longer." Funny. Apparently to some people, environmentalism is an all-or-nothing situation. Apparently you either live naked in the woods and eat twigs and berries, or you support wasting as much of everything as possible. FYI, it's not the plastic that goes into computers that's the problem -- it's the power that they consume. And tree farms are major hogs of land and are nearly as poor at supporting diverse ecosystems as conventional farms are. Anyway, as for my worst recent example? I recently received two ram chips and 6 SATA cables (each flexible and perhaps double the size of a piece of linguini along each axis) in a 1'x1.5'x2' box.

Ate as a child (or was made, at least, to try) and will never, ever eat as an adult: brussells sprouts, liver, thuringer (? some type of big sausage with HUGE visible gunks of fat.) I'll also never eat anchoveys, organ meat, little yucky fish in tins (sardines, etc), eels, oysters, or anything with a head still on it. We didn't eat too many wierd things when I was growing up, except the above. But I remember that my Czech grandmother talked fondly about blood soup and she also ate lard sandwiches (bread smeared with lard, then drizzled with chopped parsley). No wonder heart disease runs in the family!

I grew up eating alternatively grandma’s Chinese home cooking or my single dad‘s random single dad cooking - you know, dinners of steak and orange juice. Sometimes I lived in France and ate whatever single dad post docs could afford to feed their kids in Paris and Strasbourg. I don’t recall having any very special food in early 1970s France - I think we were eating street food basically. When I went to school, I lived on Top Ramen through college and grad school. We all did, with occasional splurges on Hamburger Helper, burritos, and pizza to wash down the beer. One of my friends made a ”Shrine to Top Ramen” that we bowed to daily. I don’t think my first fiance, A*****, cooked, other than pasta. I didn’t. We ate out a lot. SWMBO didn’t really cook when we started co-habitating, but she wanted to replicate the home cooked meals that she’d grown up with. We referred to the Betty Crocker cookbook a lot and made a lot of stuff that we had no idea what to do with. SWMBO denies it, but I distinctly remember one Thanksgiving hearing her on the phone to her older sister asking ”which end of the turkey do I stuff?” When we roasted a goose at Christmas, there was no-one to tell us what to do with the river of molten fat overflowing the sheet pan. I learned to cook from SWMBO’s college friend, S*****, who was putting himself through culinary school working with his partner in a catering business. He’s the top food scientist in a seafood company today. S*****’s mother became my and SWMBO’s adoptive parents in Los Angeles. She is the best cook and hostess I have ever known, and while she didn’t necessarily teach me many specific techniques, she taught us to express love and friendship with food. In recent years, I’ve learned from DD who has become a much better cook than I. Her years running the commercial kitchen at camp, leading crews of hungover teenage line cooks in feeding 150 very-picky Berkeley families nightly while improvising “dietary” meals for the few who announce that they are vegetarian soy-intolerant low-spice non-dairy but want something as tasty as the ribs and salmon everyone ELSE is getting - ”oh, and I can’t have garlic, or salt either” - well, it’s made her inflappable and inventive. (She was actually sad to leave for Marseille, because with the shortage of people applying to restaurant jobs, she really wanted to stay in Portland and try to get a line cook job in a fancy restaurant. One thing she’s thinking now about now is culinary school in Europe. She’s also trying to figure it if she can find work in a Marseille restaurant, since her teaching job isn’t full time.) So, I’ve been cooking for about 35 years, starting around age 23. I can cook some things very well, am hopeless at others, and am in a deep cooking slump at the moment - well, for the last 18 months really, because when gatherings are virtual, cooking just isn’t very interesting for me. I’m really, really ready for the pandemic to be over or become endemic. Except that a lot of my friends are older or medically fragile, and I’ve recently lost one to Covid who was neither and only in her 50s, I’m kind of getting indifferent to which it might be. Oh, last thing that might be interesting - after I’ve cooked a lot, like 8 hours in the kitchen for a dinner party, I have no interest in eating. I figured out that I want to be involved with the food, but don’t necessarily need to eat it.

I'm on a roll - Chantelle undergarments, SOMA bras, and more sandals for me. UNTUCKit shirts for DH. Also ordered waterproof mattress pads for bunk room, YETI tumbelrs so DD2 and her DH have for coffee when here, a few more dresses from WRAP (Poetry's sister company), printer ink, Oribe Impermeable Anti-Humidity Spray (after my stylist used - OMG, game changer!), and an Amika iRed straightening brush that she highly recommended. Oh, and a few more cooler shirts to wear while walking each morning. If you are a student, nurse, medical profession, responder, military (current or veteran) or goverment employee, you might be missing out on discounts from shop.id.me For example, UnderArmor was anotehr 40% off and UNTUCKit is always 25% off.