For some reason, while Wikipedia surfing, I ran across the category of Supermarkets of the United States. I found a need to score myself on how many of them I've been to. (43 out of 210, for those interested.) New meme, maybe?

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Adding to the list of plants used for gelling, I just found out that bracken fern rhizomes, in the family Dennstaedtiaceae. Woo! Nine families!

Looking at the list, I note that the Japanese must be really into gelled things. Traditional Japanese desserts use glutinous rice, bracken, konnyaku, agar, and kudzu...five of the nine.

I have been pining away for a coat rack, but two problems keep coming up: 1) coat racks are expensive and 2) inexpensive coat racks are ugly and don't hold many coats anyway ( Read more... )

Tom left me last June and I filed for divorce at the end of last year. There's probably a lot of story in there that I could go into, but the short version, from my point of view: Tom freaked out because he wanted to keep acting like we were 25, and I wanted to be a grown up ( Read more... )

I am totally fascinated by the myriad sources that jelly or gummy foods come from. A short list:

Coconut jelly, from young coconuts
Gelatin, obviously, from collagen of animals
Agar, from seaweed
Glutinous rice flour (mochi etc)
Tapioca, from a euphorb, Manihot esculenta
Sago, from the sago palm (not the cycad, the palm)
Arrowroot, from Maranta ( Read more... )

From this NEA study"The survey also studied the correlation between literary reading and other activities. For instance, literature readers watched an average of 2.7 hours of television each day, while people who do not read literary works watched an average of 3.1 hours daily. Adults who did not watch TV in a typical day are 48 percent more likely ( Read more... )

Yeah. It wasn't very bad...it felt about the same level of difficulty as talking to colleagues you don't know about the stuff you work on.

The light coming in the windows is somewhat orange in tone. Outside, you can see a light ashfall covering the cars. It's very eerie.

The fires aren't too near me, but the entire LA Basin is full of smoke, and I don't know if it's psychosomatic or if it's real, but I swear my lungs hurt and my thinking is not up to snuff. Bleh.

Two flat tires. Two days ( Read more... )

My dog (I assume it was Jodie, but I wasn't a witness to the action) ate my cell phone today. By the way, a chewed lithium-ion battery is really, really hot. I used potholders to put it outside on the driveway so as not to set anything on fire.