Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I have a lot of chicken in the fridge. It’s been the best bargain in a bad economy, so I was glad to have bought a special of two multi-packs for the price of one. I divvied the various cutlets and whole breasts into individual servings and put them in the freezer. When the time came that everything went up in price because gas was priced so high due to the conflict in Russia and Ukraine, I had a pile of chicken for dinner. Simply add vegetables and you’ve got a meal.

The only problem is that chicken gets dull rather quickly. There is only so much you can do to chicken without going into insanely unhealthy territory. That leaves frying out. I’ve been sticking to sauteing with healthy olive oil and a variety of seasonings. The spice rack has seen some shortages lately, and the prices of them have gone up, too.

Now I know why Ebeneezer Scrooge stuck to gruel. Heart healthy and cheap. No sauteing involved.

At least I have oatmeal with sliced banana.

Right now it’s summer, so I have cold cereal and banana, and a few blueberries thrown in.

Scrooge would balk at the prices on blueberries and bananas. But then he would be enraged at the price of chicken.

I don’t think gruel would make a good diet choice overall, but it would certainly help with regularity. The key to hot cereal is to keep it as close to its original grain form as possible to get the most benefit. Steel cut oatmeal is a good choice. Scrooge would be angry at the added cost of steel cutting, I suppose.

Chicken used to be an easy way to prepare dinner. Now they’re considered contaminated, and one must burn the kitchen down and rebuild after every preparation to avoid toxic germs from the same stuff we fry and eat with gusto. Go figure.

I think I do a good job of handling chicken and keeping a clean kitchen. I’m just getting tired of one variety of meat every night. This will mean finding alternatives that are healthy and do not require the bank account of a sultan to afford.

There are some things one can do with hamburger. Is spaghetti in summer a bad thing?

I’m trying to eat healthier. It isn’t easy, because the food industry makes it complicated. The trend is portion control; balancing each food group so you don’t eat too much of one thing or not enough of the other. I figured it might help to use real-life numbers, so I began utilizing my scale to weigh my portion sizes.

The first thing I measure in the morning is cereal. The boxes of my cereal come in a well-rounded 12 ounce size. The serving size is usually around 39 grams–less if you don’t opt for the regular variety–per bowl. This means that 12 ounces equals about 340.19 grams. You will find yourself with a short bowl of cereal if you consistently weigh your portions at 39 grams each.

Who wants to short change their breakfast every eight days? I mix and match, opening a new box and topping off the portion size. The cycle of boxes with teeny leftovers then continues.

I’ve had fun measuring the cereal, because the scale takes a moment or so to update the weight, so I could add five of those grain-based bits and end up with 40 grams, take off two and not get to 39. Also, no matter how dry my hands are, they stick to my fingers.

Earlier today I bought an indulgent bag of popcorn. The serving size was 28 grams, which provided me with about two handfuls of the stuff. The flavored coating added weight. Silly me, I should have gone for air-popped with nothing else added, and I would’ve had 28 grams the size of a small carnival-sized bag.

I’ve learned that cookies tend to allow you one pair per serving, but I have yet to meet somebody who eats just two cookies.

A serving size of peanut butter is two tablespoons, so to cover a slice of bread for a sandwich, you would probably use more than the 2-3 servings the famous My Plate (formerly the Food Pyramid), set by the USDA, recommends as a daily guideline. It makes one rather thin sandwich. We’re used to seeing commercials with luxuriously spread goodness, often shown in slow motion and carpeting the bread a good half inch thick. Dietary wise, that’s a no-no.

Apparently we can’t keep sugar out of anything when it comes to food. It hides in plain sight in your salad dressing and, yes, even in that slice of bread on which you’re cutting back on the peanut butter. I have been trying to keep my sugar intake limited to what occurs in foods without being added, so blueberries and bananas are in, but a spoonful in my morning beverage is out.

Somebody would probably advise me to stick to a prepared meal program in which the portions are measured for me, but the expense for those weekly deliveries is exorbitant. Also, have you ever tried to read the labels on prepared foods of that type?

Anyway, if the numbers on the scale go down instead of up, I’ll be happy. And I’ll reward myself with four cookies.

Nobody could call me a true gamer. I don’t participate in role-playing, I only use one computer and one monitor, and I don’t dwell in a dank basement in a Command Center corner festooned with gizmos and discarded food containers. However, I do have a collection of games I play, and they’re frustrating enough at times to make up for my lack of skill in cube building or creature slaying.

I play Solitaire. Five different versions. The classic version is referred to as Klondike; it includes seven piles of graduated stacks of cards from one card to seven, with the top card upturned on each stack, and one must play the aces and grow each stack from the pile of playable remaining cards to the top of the stack ending with Kings. The other versions include Spider, which requires you to play cards from King to ace to remove them from the board until it’s empty; FreeCell, which allows the player to displace cards while building a Klondike stack by suit; Pyramid, which eliminates cards by playing any two which add up to 13 (Kings are discards, Queens are 12, Jacks are 11); and TriPeaks, which allows you to play a sequence of cards in order, switching directions when needed, to eliminate them from the board.

Sounds easy until you are challenged to play one particular card, or grow a stack to a certain number of one card. The levels of play are challenging from Easy to Expert, and daily challenges enable players to compete with others for time and completion. I have made second place a few times, out of hundreds of thousands of players. Sometimes I only manage to make the top twenty, if I’m lucky.

For those who get stuck, social media offers cheat videos from expert players who apparently make a living demonstrating how to win a difficult round. A few times a week I may find myself watching Marcella, who seems adept at figuring out how to shift cards around to do her bidding.

My normal method of game play is not to read the goal. I find that the temptation is to focus on that (“eliminate the six of clubs; okay, where is the six and how do I get to it?) and not calculate how to actually play, which wastes time. Instead, I play the game as intended, and when I reach the goal the game stops automatically.

This time, it didn’t work.

I came across an expert level puzzle–the last one for the daily challenges–in which I fruitlessly attempted to play FreeCell by digging out the aces and trying to work my stacks. It was proving to be a disaster. None of the cards appeared to be in a workable order. I tried for twenty minutes, then went to my online advisor Marcella, who solved the puzzle in about twenty seconds. In not reading the goal, I missed the fact that there was only one card needed, and it was about ten cards away from being revealed.

So I really was playing against myself, and was my own worst enemy. Expert level, indeed. More like expert distraction. The only way it was a hard puzzle was that I made it harder by not reading the goal.

The question now becomes whether I remain oriented to playing, or to solving what is called for. Either way, the clock ticks, and making the top ten doesn’t allow time for scrutinizing.

In a way, Solitaire represents life itself in that respect. But it’s less frustrating than chess, which I have yet to master, because the people I encounter who know how to play are not up to teaching.

I don’t think Marcella is into chess moves. But she’s a mean Solitaire solver.

I wonder how photogenic one has to be in order to do video blogging? I’ve never been that camera friendly, as evidenced by the fact that I had the world’s ugliest senior high school yearbook photo in history. When I graduated and weighed 99 pounds with clothing, the fates still moved against me; it seems the hairdresser was delayed in starting my appointment for some unknown reason, and in the morning when my mother and I worked to get my hairdo ready, it wouldn’t cooperate. To this day I’ll never know if the hairdresser jinxed my hairdo.

The next day during the photo shoot, the photographer kept trying to get me to smile when my mouth was full of braces and various related accessories. When it was time for re-shooting the photos before the yearbook was compiled, the notice didn’t get to my class, so I missed it. Therefore, I looked hideous in the photo I had to settle for. My real graduation photo was taken on the date we got our diplomas, and I had my braces removed that morning, so I looked, generally, spectacular.

As spectacular as one can be if one is not particularly photogenic.

Recently I had to privatize my videos because I was being trolled by a scammer. I’m not sure which is worse: being told by somebody who may be in some overseas Jibbip telling me I’m pretty as a “queen” when I know I’m not, or having overly critical folks tell me, in so many words, to get lost because I’m not pretty. I suppose that, knowing who I am, I could always just ignore the naysayers and pooh-pooh the romance scammers from Jibbip. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

People who do videos regularly probably deal with this issue all the time. At least they don’t worry about being photogenic, because they put themselves on camera being camera ready.

Our public go-to newscasters and program hosts hit the gym and spend tons on anti-aging goop and hairdresser appointments that are always prompt, and before going on camera they have makeup artists to primp and highlight them to the glam extreme. I have my mirror and my makeup haul from CVS.

I have the register tape to prove it.

So the question remains whether I will attempt a vlog or not. I don’t expect to be an influencer or sensation; I just want to put another opinion on life in general out into the world.

If my hair will cooperate.

Occasionally it’s good to step away from a project and take a look at what it looks like so far, what is and isn’t working and what to do next.

After years of blogging and venturing into websites and social media, I realize it’s time to do some housekeeping. This means that I may miss a post or two, and finding me may result in a different path than before. I’m shopping around for what will work the best.

One thing is certain, Facebook will be disappointed, because after fruitless arguing about the page where my blog has sat for over a year and can’t do anything, I’m taking the page down. My presence will be the same, but I can’t see paying a monthly fee for nothing.

There is an insurance ad out there in which a fellow is performing a social media challenge, jokingly claiming it should receive “tens and tens of views.” That’ s certainly not nothing, but it’s only the potential of what could be if your media platform won’t support your getting there.

I will keep you, my readers, abreast of what is happening. If you weren’t reading, I would have no reason to blog at all. Thank you.

As those self-checkout lanes promise, “Please wait, system processing.”

If you have ever walked into your home and said to yourself or somebody you trust, “Gee, it smells like (insert malodorous description here),” you know how it can be when something smelly launches an invasion.

When such an odor hit my nose the other day, I attributed it to the Caesar salad I had brought home. The salad greens which did not look as appealing went into the garbage, and the container it came in was consigned to the recycling. After a few hours out and about, I came home to something unpleasant smelling, so I re-bagged the garbage and put it in the trash, figuring that was the culprit since I had not knotted the garbage bag. That didn’t work. I then double-bagged the trash bag to no avail, and washed the garbage container. Still no luck.

It reminded me of a story which circulated some time ago (and occasionally comes up now) about a woman who was done wrong by her man, who was seeing another woman and gave the “old model” the boot. On her last day in her wonderful home, she dined on caviar and shrimp and enjoyed herself. She then inserted some of the leftovers into the curtain rods. As time passed, the foul odor from the hidden and aging morsels caused the man and his new partner considerable distress, which did not resolve through replacing carpets, painting, fumigating or any common tactic. In the end they moved out, and when the jerk mentioned in a conversation with his ex that he needed to unload the house and nobody would buy it, she offered him a bailout and moved back in. Of course, the kicker to the story is that the couple moved into their new place and brought with them the old curtain rods.

At least that mystery was solved by the perpetrator. Mine is still ongoing, and I didn’t do it on purpose.

I don’t think anybody visiting my home would flee looking green around the gills, but I can tell that something is amiss somewhere, and it happened just recently.

This means becoming Shirley Holmes (Sherlock’s underrated distant cousin) to find and fix the cause.

I do love a good mystery, but only when I don’t have to keep on smelling it until I solve it.

It’s the Fourth of July weekend in the US. We have a three-day weekend, or some folks took Friday off to make it a four-day weekend. The Fourth falls on a Monday, making it perfect for people who want a long weekend, and if you’re in a job in which the first of the month is a pain in the keister, simply ask for Friday off and it won’t be a problem (at least not until you return to work on the fifth and find out how much backlog you have).

This is a weekend for cookouts, parades, and fireworks. Our modern technology, however, has also made a new option available for public enjoyment: drone shows. Drones can be computer coordinated to present a post-dusk light show in the sky. It’s a new idea and still in its early stages, but there are some great videos out there demonstrating the grandeur of such shows. They may well be the new fireworks for the new age.

Drone shows have a few benefits: no emissions from exploding powders, no loud bangs to damage hearing and frighten pets (which increase the number of runaway and lost animals every year), and a near zero chance of injury, as in no lost limbs or eyesight from premature ignition of what are small bombs placed in John Q. Public’s inexperienced hands.

The cost is steep right now, but as the popularity grows, drones become more common and their users more experienced, prices will go down to levels the local municipalities will be able to manage.

I’m all for these shows. There appear to be no downsides to them, except possibly a disabled drone heading earthward and bonking somebody on the head. At least it’s not blown-off limbs.

We did the “bombs bursting in air” during the battle at Fort McHenry. Maybe it’s time to just let our lights shine on and move to drone shows.

Even though we are human beings and have populated this planet for countless ages, we still seem to misunderstand ourselves. Sometimes we do so at our peril, when we make or break rules that are trying to keep us all safe.

At the moment of birth, we begin the process of setting our lives in stone by designating names, or titles, or conditions. A boy born too early and too pudgy, or a girl born past her scheduled due date and too skinny. We put the newborn in a blue blanket or a pink one; we clothe them in cute outfits with patterns on them of animals, constellations or the local sports team.

We take endless photos of them passively surrounded by baseball-themed toys or princess tiaras. Recently a woman had her infant’s ears pierced prior to discharge from the maternity ward. Perhaps infant tattooing will be next?

We raise our children on our beliefs, or let them make their way blindly with no sense of order. Sometimes they are well-rounded, but at other times our children develop autism, anxiety, depression or behavioral issues. Still we plod on with the program of setting up who the kids are going to be. Our rules; their pain.

At a certain age, we start establishing that the human body needs some parts to be hidden, particularly in the lower torso region. Females have the added burden of concealing their chest areas. And so the divide in the genders begins in earnest, at least for the children. Nobody reviews a thing with the adults, which is a separate problem we won’t discuss here.

Schools receive mixed messages about what to teach children about their bodies. In my time, the girls were huddled into the auditorium, the windows blocked with paper shields, and we saw a few special films geared toward exposing us to the wonders of female maturity. As far as I know, the boys never received such an initiation about themselves. Women enter into a world of monthly scheduling, hiding and controlling body regions which must be kept hidden, and how to suddenly adapt to when boys enter into it all. And this happens in a vacuum, when puberty does not.

Some parents are so against sex education, they send their children to schools in which it isn’t taught. And some people are so set against letting women learn anything, some never attend school at all. A body of water can separate the free from the oppressed in many parts of the world: in the United States, it’s sometimes just a state border. It is a tragedy that human ignorance is set by a wooden gavel hitting a wooden slab after robed, designated individuals decide an argument is settled one way or another.

Throughout history, women have been given freedoms and had them taken away; we have been lesser citizens and then revered in cycles. It used to be women were offered courtesy; men would stand when we entered a room, or doors were held for us. Now it’s everybody (formerly man) for themselves.

We were allowed to own property in some early cultures, but shunned from public view in others. We covered our faces with scarves or full-on hoods and robes. We did “let it all hang out” for a short while, which wasn’t such a good idea, but we did gain the right to vote.

Knowledge is a vital part of what makes us human, regardless of gender. The freedom to become who we are meant to be is often stifled by the blind routines under which some people conduct their lives and raise their children, and it can differ from household to household. What is a crime in the house on the corner may not be in the prettiest home on the block. You are sharing your daily lives with both of them.

Eventually, all the people take sides on what they want the world to be like. Sometimes the decisions we make are detrimental to certain groups. What we don’t need is to set up one gender or the other to be less than what they are the moment they enter this world; that is when the real damage begins.

If a human being is now considered less because of being female, we’re all in big trouble.

As a writer, I have worked for years to stay on top of my projects. My biggest one is my WIP (work in progress), which is likely to grow into a series. With the help of a supportive critique group, my writing is getting along well, and I decided to go on a writing retreat to focus on it outside the demands of work, paying bills, shopping, and trying to have a social life. I selected a vacation spot for a few days of nothing but writing. That way it didn’t matter if the weather was bad or not: I’d be sequestered in a little corner just writing away.

Before getting to the vacation, however, I participated in a writer’s group meeting featuring two people in the publishing industry. They planned to discuss some basics and tips. That’s in the future for me, but it never hurts to get some advance advice.

Imagine my shock when the publishers started talking about what doesn’t work in the industry, and I realized, to my horror, that they were describing me! I fit many of the descriptive caveats they were talking about, and then some. I had too few followers. My first installment was too long.

I had to make sure my mouth didn’t drop open, or I didn’t start crying. Fortunately, I was on mute. But there I was, my face a neutral mask on the Zoom meeting screen, feeling like I was the writer formally known as. . . . a melted snowball in the seventh sub-basement of Hell. Hopeless.

I never felt so depressed in my life. What was I writing a novel for, if it won’t make it out of the starting gate? Why should I continue risking arthritis in my hands typing away for no reason?

Then I remembered that our founding fathers said we were given the right to pursue happiness, but it isn’t guaranteed. Besides, these were two people from an indie press, small and exclusive, so maybe my story would not apply anyway, at least not to them.

My critique chapters have been written (more like revising right now) one set of 3,500 words at a time (that’s our group limit), so maybe I must dissect the story a bit shorter than I originally planned.

It’s quite a shock to the system to hear some negative news a few days before you’re planning to do the very thing they said you shouldn’t bother doing. I don’t care.

Some of the best works have come from the strangest of circumstances. Publishing a novel involves a bit of serendipity. Luck. Being in the right place, with the right manuscript, at the right time.

I brushed away the detritus of criticism, and I have decided to continue.

I’ve never been one to give up.

The experienced walker can take on the length of a marathon–26.2 miles–in less than eight hours. I took on an estimated six-plus miles in New York City the other day, and my feet are killing me.

I guess you could say 6.2 miles down and 26 to go.

Don’t invite me to a marathon, unless you want me to cheer from the stands.

Walking in the city is commonplace, and I’ve done it for years, but not that much. Normally my route circles a ten-block radius if I’m going to the theater, or a straight stroll if I am going to Lincoln Center.

Naturally not all streets in New York City are in a straight line. Some are circles or meander off to one side or another, which I learned while trying to go to First Avenue. I passed through the normal countdown of designated hot spots, including Park Avenue and Avenue of the Americas. Then I would take a right turn down a street or two and move down another avenue again.

I was dressed for Lincoln Center, so that meant “sensible” shoes instead of sneakers. My old faithful shoes, which had provided painless comfort forever, decided to rebel a quarter of the way to First Avenue, and I started feeling the telltale pains of a flayed blister. As I walked, I reminded myself that, to remedy the situation, I had to find something rare in the city: a place to sit down that didn’t involve buying anything. Not that I don’t want to support businesses, but it was between breakfast and lunch, and most places were not open yet, and the idea of tending my foot in a public building was rather icky.

As I limped along, I passed a fellow sucking on a joint and blowing fragrant clouds, which made their way past me. So I was gimping along and smelled of weed. Not a great start to a day out.

I finally found seating around a tree, within minutes of my destination, and applied a bandage. Fortunately I’m one of those pedestrians whose purse contains emergency everything. A park full of benches turned up two blocks later.

My plan was to visit a small shop in the thirties somewhere, and I found it. It wasn’t going to open for two more hours, and I couldn’t wait that long, because I had to return to familiar territory before my show was scheduled. So much for making a small stop for a small shop. Maybe next time, in the fall, after I’ve bought some comfy sneakers that can pass for sensible shoes to the untrained eye. One must try to be fashionable at Lincoln Center, even if your feet kill you. Otherwise I would need a taxi ride, where it doesn’t matter if you wear sensible shoes. Just shoes that protect you from a cab floor.

By the time I got home, after 14 1/2 hours, I felt as if I had used up my lifetime allotment of walking privileges, and feared I would never walk again. Fortunately my blister is healing, the legs are holding their own, and a thorough night’s sleep seems to have alleviated most of the physical damage from trying to navigate over six miles of the city.

It’s estimated that, when a person is urged to walk 10,000 steps daily, I walked under 13,000 steps, so I carried over 3,000 to today. I’m going to need them if I’m going to get those fashionable sneakers.