At least the humans Connie and Neil thought it was strange…Ima justa cuddly bear and don’t waste brain power trying to figger stuff like this out.

Lessee…updates from the house. We had the first death of somebody we actually knew from COVID…a fellow named Greg down at the Elks. He was early 50s but overweight and with some blood pressure problems but had moved down here several years back from up north someplace. His kids came down and one of them turned out to be positive and he turned up positive. Never got the vaccine…apparently he wasn’t much of a shot person…so when his symptoms got bad he went into the hospital, thence onto a ventilator…and passed away after a couple of weeks. We’ll have another one in the near future…the maintenance guy over at Saint Therese parish is also on a ventilator with failing organs.

Both of them were pretty nice folks…always a friendly conversation when we went into the lodge or the church. Neil and Connie actually sat next to Greg at the bar in the Elks (3 weeks or more back now so we’re just fine) the night before his positive test and he seemed just fine then. He was really a lot like most RV folk…strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet.

I don’t know about Greg and why he didn’t get vaccinated…but the guy at church is a pretty far right wing guy and I imagine got all caught up in the political BS over being vaccinated or not…terrible to do something that seems really dumb and end up on a ventilator because of ridiculous political disagreements.

It turns out that Connie has never in her life had the southern dish shrimp and grits…mostly because back in the day it was a southern only thing and not seen much outside the south and then later on by the time it was more widespread on the menu she had discovered her allergy to shrimp…well, actually the preservative that gets dumped on the shrimp (most of the time) right after they come out of the water and go on the ice. She discovered back in her laboratory inspection days this allergy…for several years before that she sort of got tingly lips when she ate shrimp but was off on an inspection trip and had a plate of 30 shrimp scampi at the restaurant…then discovered her skin getting blotchy and hands swelling up. After a quick all to the local hospital…they told her to come straight to the emergency room and report immediately to the check in station. She did so…the nurse took one look at her and yelled down the hall “we got an anaphylactic shock here” and within 3 minutes. She was on a gurney with an IV, some adrenaline or whatever they give you for that and they were lubing up her rings to get them off before they had to cut them off.

The only reason we know it’s the preservative is because of Neil’s mothers’s ancient allergist who…after Connie went through lots of allergy testing to figure it out and they told her it wasn’t shrimp she was allergic to and they had no idea what caused the problem…his mother asked her old time allergist and he told her it was the preservative…he called it ShrimpFresh but it probably comes in dozens of brand names of the same chemical.

Pro tip here…if you ever have a stuck ring and it won’t come off…you probably tried cooking oil or vaseline or some similar sort of lubricant and found it didn’t work all that well. The solution here…is Windex…yeah, the stuff you clean glass with. Spray that on the ring and finger and it slips right off. We learned this not at any medical facility but at a jewelry store in the upper midwest someplace where Neil needed to get his wedding ring stretched a little a couple years back.

So…back to the story…after that episode in Birmingham AL she doesn’t eat shrimp any more…only had it once since and that was some that Bryan’s father in law caught himself so we knew it was clean.  That means that Neil never gets shrimp either unless we are out at a restaurant because he’s just too lazy to cook both shrimp for him and something else for her…that means twice the work and twice the pans as the pan that cooks the shrimp gets contaminated and that would not be Good Eats© for her.

He was reading one of his travel blogs the other day and the author’s wife made him shrimp and grits for dinner…and Neil thought…heck, I’l just make scallops and grits instead…thanks Nick. Basically you cook yourself some grits…Neil used some instant ones he has flavored with cheese and jalapeño peppers but he cooked them on the stove for awhile with milk and butter instead of water and then added some cream so they were much more like fresh made. For those of you not familiar with the dish…you cut up some bacon and cook that and set it aside, then cook the scallops in the bacon grease. Set those aside and add some onions, roasted garlic, and basil pesto along with a spoonful or so of pizza sauce and some white wine…so you end up with a relatively thin and slightly red sauce. Plate the grits, bacon on top, then the scallops and top with the sauce. Then you take your good $50 a bottle really thick aged balsamic vinegar and do the swirly presento thing and grate some Parmesan Reggiano on top, add a glass of wine…and voila.

Mighty darned tasty…you coulda put that in front of them at an Eye-talian restaurant and charged them 30 bucks a plate and they would have gladly paid it.

Ok…the strangest thing.

Ya know how if you put a bunch of women working together in the same office their periods tend to synchronize? Yep…if you didn’t already know that…they do. And ya know how if you put a bunch of out of synchronization metronomes on a table that can move slightly they’ll synchronize? Yep…they really do that too.

Today we found out that your T-shirt pile will do exactly the same thing. Now Neil has two stacks of T-shirts in his closet and the one that gets worn is the top on on then right hand pile. When it gets low the top of the left pile gets moved to the bottom of the right pile and freshly washed ones go on bottom of the left pile. (Yeah, I know that’’s weird…but it’s because he has CDO…which is very similar to OCD but it’s in the RIGHT DARNED ORDER.) He can do this because all of his T-shirts (and all of his Hawaiian shirts as well…they get worn from the right side and put back from the laundry on the left because…well just because) all go with all of his shorts so color matching isn’t really an issue for him. Actually…it wouldn’t be an issue for him anyway since he’s male and just doesn’t care if his shirt and shorts match or not. His only exception is that if they’re going out someplace nice he picks a Hawaiian shirt shirt that doesn’t clash with her dress or skirt/blouse but other than that it’s top of the right pile or rightmost hanger. Connie’s scheme is similar but she doesn’t pick the top of the pile…being a woman she has to be color coordinated so she gets the closest to the top of the pile that goes with the s shorts/capris/skirt. 

Anyways…after his bike ride today…he had to stay in the neighborhood and go between rain showers and literally got back 3 minutes before it poured again…she had showered while he was gone and he did the top of the right hand pile thing…and well…just look.

Eerie…ain’t it? And yeah…I know their heads is cropped off but you needed to be able to read the T-shirt words and his arm just ain’t long enough to get a better usie than that. Yeah…an usie, that’s what I said…it’s like a selfie but with more than one person in it. Stole the term from another of his travel blogging buddies…thanks Clarke.

So’s…the Democrats are lumping all their progressive demands into the $3.5. trillion reconciliation give away bill…and they’re going to raise taxes on corporations and the “rich” to pay for it. You know…you’ve heard it before…the 1% just need to pay a little more so they’re paying their fair share.

Anyways…I just googled it and the total wealth of ALL billionaires in the US is just about $4 trillion…in other words if you completely seized (which is unconstitutional) 10% of their assets…there would not be enough money to pay just for the current progressive wish list bill and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. 

Then there’s
this…based on data from the IRS…61% of US households paid ZERO federal income tax in 2020…this is up 40% from 2019. So…tell me again how rich people need to pay their fair share? Funny you don’t see statistics like this from the progressive side…and when conservatives bring them up the left says “they still pay employment tax and sales tax so that’s all they need to pay”. Sounds like BEP rationalization to me (BEP = Bovine End Product, it’s a clean way to say BS).

Out in the great (well, maybe not so great after all) state of Oregon…they’ve got a new law that
rescinds the requirement to show proficiency in math or reading in order to graduate from high school.

Then there’s the almost constant complaints from the Democratic Party about how those evil Republicans are gerrymandering the House districts to maintain control…followed by Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) who says that
“the Democratic party should resort to gerrymandering in blue states like Illinois and New York to maintain its majority in the House in the 2022 midterms”.  Hypocritical liars.

Then there’s
this report…which reports that…according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature anyway…a fish known as the Giant Sea Bass is critically endangered…and that we need to take drastic action to stop the decline of this species. The article goes on to report that the Union based their conclusion based solely on data gathered from US waters…despite the fact that 73% of the range of the Giant Sea Bass is located in…and I kid you not…Mexican waters. The fellow that wrote the article…is a marine ecologist named Arturo Ramírez-Valdez who works at UCSD…reports that the Giant Sea Bass…which gets up to 9 feet long and 700 pounds…is plentiful both in the water and in the fish markets…they’re everywhere. Data shows that the largest ever harvest in Mexican waters was 386 tons in 1933 and a generally accepted definition of a collapsed fishery is “less than 10% of the maximum ever harvest”…the ongoing Mexican catch is a steady trend of about 55 tons per year…so in his opinion the fishery has not collapsed and the fish is not critically endangered. The thrust of his article is that conservation organizations should actually research the facts before making conclusions rather than coming up with the conclusions first and then cherry picking data to support their findings.

Interesting things found on the net.

In 1985, Dr. David L. Goodstein published a thermodynamics textbook named States of Matter…with a very strange opening passage. It’s highlighted below.

And the best two of the week.

and since we hate cats.

Cyas.