Death By Bok Choi

Here I am, all bleary-eyed, hooked on yet another television series on Netflix.  Do you have any idea how long it takes to watch 26 episodes which were originally spaced out over two seasons?  I don’t either, because I forget when I started watching this.  I do know that partway through my fascination with the show,  Netflix experienced streaming problems and apologized for the inconvenience of almost two days of inability to load.  That was brutal.  Almost made me want to demand my eight dollars back for the month.  But they got it fixed and I forgave them.

The Killing  is an American crime show based on the Danish television series Forbrydelsen  (The Crime.)

This is a little two season synopsis from Wikipedia, where there’s lots more info if you’re curious –

Season 1 (2011)
The first season covers the first two weeks of the investigation of the murder of local teenager Rosie Larsen and has three main storylines: the police investigation into Rosie’s murder, the Larsen family’s attempts to deal with their grief, and the fluctuating electoral fortunes of a political campaign that becomes embroiled in the case.

Season 2 (2012)
The season resumes the investigation into the murder and reveals secrets about the Larsen family as well as a possible conspiracy within the campaign race and the Seattle police department. The Larsen murder case gets closed with the discovery of those involved in it.

And when they say ‘those’ involved in it, they really do mean more than one bad guy.  The two detectives assigned to the case take two whole seasons to get to the bottom of this mess.  Just when they think they’ve got it narrowed down, new information sends them in a different direction with suspects all over the place.  Everybody has a secret or is withholding information or is basically clueless or simply an idiot.  Over all it’s a good story and well acted and I didn’t need much encouragement to start watching season three.

But there were some pretty hard to believe scenarios.  For instance, when a candidate for mayor gets shot, almost dies, is paralyzed from the waist down, weeps about it a couple of times and then hops into a wheel chair and continues on with his campaign.  Come on.  I know politicians are a bizarre bunch, but that bit was a real eye-roller.  Sorry to give that away if you haven’t watched it.

Nowhere in the first two seasons was there any mention of bok choi.  And I don’t believe anyone could actually die from an overdose.  However, if you could, W is the guilty party here.  He doesn’t eat it, but he keeps buying bags of it, every time he goes shopping.  And I keep trying to figure out ways to use it up before it goes soft and mushy and its leaves shrivel up.  I put it in soups and salads and smoothies and sometimes even eat it raw like you would celery.  Some of it unfortunately ends up in the compost bin.  And then he notices there’s only one bag left and off he goes to buy another one.  And the cycle continues.  This is not a long or interesting enough story to dedicate an entire blog post to, so I’m adding it to the end to explain the weird title.  So far it is unclear which one of us is going to die.

 

Drink Drank Drunk

We drank our coffee, we drunk our coffee.  We did not get drunk on coffee, and that is why, although it is acceptable to ask who drunk all the coffee, we don’t because of the association of the word ‘drunk’ with intoxication.  It just sounds better to say ‘drank’.

I would also like to say think, thank, thunk.  Because English.  It thunks.

Thanks to Electronic Bag Lady and her bag of bits, I now know the meaning of this excellent word:  QUAFFTIDE  Go there for the definition of the word, and stay for many good reads.  I think you will thank me later.

Now if you had asked me yesterday if I was done with homework for the rest of my life,  I would have told you yes.  But then EBL also said this.

Your homework is to tell me your terms for quafftiding like it’s 2015, and ideally also to relate an anecdote about such a party. It may involve Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters if you wish, and be purely hypothetical. No photocopiers should be harmed in the production of your story.

Although it wasn’t written in that exact annoying colour or font, still I have decided to take it seriously.  Never having outgrown my nerdy tendency to complete all homework assignments ever given to me,  I will now ramble off all the phrases I know or have used personally to describe what happens to you when you participate to an unhealthy degree in quafftidling events.

 sloshed, buzzed, wasted, shit faced,

three sheets to the wind, tipsy, pickled, pissed,

trashed, hooped, under the influence, plastered,

hammered, blind drunk,

on a bender, ripped,

looped

blotto

smashed,

wiggy,

stoned,

loaded, half cut,

out of your tree, and totally wrecked.

There are probably more I’ve forgotten (and most of these are no doubt no longer popular in 2015)  but that’s all I’ve got, likely because of what all that booze supposedly does to your brain cells.  Contrary to what you might have been lead to believe (because I often talk about wine and like to put words into wine glass shapes) I don’t drink much at all anymore.  My doctor asked me how much alcohol I consume on a daily or weekly basis, and I said  “Just the occasional bottle of wine.  Shit!  I mean GLASS.  Glass of wine.  Gawd.”

I drink more when I’m on a holiday or with people of like mind who are also drinking of course.  And I certainly did my share of partying in high school and university,  and socially whenever we could get away with it while our kids were young, until we decided we should set a better example for them.

I remember how impressed W’s university friends were on a couple of occasions when I was able to keep up with them consuming draft beer.  Some guys are just so easily dazzled.  I don’t remember ever seeing any Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters though.  When I’ve had enough to drink and can no longer feel my feet, I say goodnight and go to bed.  So it’s entirely possible I passed out before they joined the party.

Word Brain

I’m playing this word game (it’s an Apple app) because I like word games and because I want to keep my brain functioning.  I’m not sure if this is helping, or just adding to the general confusion.  The game starts off being really simple and easy (to get you hooked) and becomes more challenging as you progress.  All you have to do is find words by running your finger over the letters in the right order.  The above picture doesn’t make sense to me, because where is the word music in that block of letter blocks?  More puzzling than that, how in the world did this player get two hundred and fifty hints??  It must be a level way beyond the one I’m on.  And either this person is a genius who never uses hints, or there is some magic way to cheat to get them.  I’m going to google that later.

The puzzles I am solving now consist of two words.  If you don’t guess them in the right order, the second one could have its letters drop down too scrambled to solve.  So you have to hit the circling arrows and start again.  When I got to the two-word puzzles it took me – oh, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 10 puzzles – to figure out that the solutions are not words that go together to mean something.  You know, like ‘chair back’, ‘barn yard’ and ‘rock band’.

Here are some of the best ones I found which I think we should add to the English language as two-word phrases.  Just because.  They conjure up the best images.

1.  lemon face (give a baby something sour to see a really great one)

2.  fish shout (hey guys, boat bottom overhead!  go deep!)

3.  egg tennis (hardest serves to return ever)

4.  book elbow (you read way too much)

5.  snail skis (not the best choice for downhill racing)

6.  sock petal (this flower smells weird)

7.  melon well (fetch a pail of honey dews)

8.  sun waffle (for breakfast – moon waffles are for midnight snacks)

9.  skull tent (not proven to be a bear deterrent)

10.  spinach tv (the only reason you have it is because it’s part of a package)

This game really should give these kinds of hints, instead of merely showing you the first letter of one of the words.  If they did that, I would have gotten at lot more of them right, a lot faster.  If anyone from Apple would like to contact me for other advice about their apps, I’m not that busy.

Gentle

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Snow is gently falling this morning and if there is any wind at all, it is gentle too.

My Saturday morning house is quiet and the January light reflects off the gently rotating hangy-things dangling across the kitchen window.

Yes, there does appear to be a photo in this slide show which doesn’t belong.  It is meant to show that beauty can be found on a cluttered kitchen counter.

I am about to begin session three of my gentle stretching of miscellaneous newly awakened muscles.

There are miles to go before I sleep.

Feel free to take all of this and shape it in to an epic piece of poetry.  My brain is currently tuned to the gentle setting and won’t cooperate.

Stretching It All Out

What can I say, right now, with certainty?  “It is time to get up off the couch and do something about these atrophying muscles before I am unable to get up off the couch at all.”  I am quoting that annoying little voice in my head.  Some days it makes a lot of sense. This morning I came across this interesting looking book in an e-mail from Amazon.  They are always sending me suggestions on how to spend my money.  And although normally I am very boring and predictable, sometimes I do things that are spontaneous and insane, like spending almost eighteen Canadian dollars on a book and an author I’ve never heard of before. I blame my ignorance on rarely watching television.  And a few other things that I don’t feel like getting in to here.

But who is there among us who would not like to be 10 years younger and 10 years lighter?  Excepting of course 40 pound ten-year olds.  But what really sold me was this phrase.. gentle, scientifically designed workouts based on Classical Stretch and Essentrics…

I don’t believe the aging process has any hope in hell of ever being reversible, but staying as fit as possible, for as long as I can, definitely appeals to me.  As does not doing anything strenuous which might cause me to break out in a sweat. So I downloaded the book, had a shower, fixed my hair and put on a bit of make up, just in case anyone drops by, so that they will not sadly shake their heads at me and wonder why I am letting myself go, now that I don’t go to work anymore.  No one has actually done that yet, but I like to be prepared, because you never know.

Normally I would not do any of these self grooming things before getting some exercise (whatever that even means anymore, it’s been so long).  Then I started to read.  And I read and read and read, eventually skipping through a bunch of pages and then going back to the table of contents to see if we were EVER going to get to the part where we’re told what to do to scientifically stretch our damned muscles.  There was really no need to sell me on the WHY of all this.  Let’s just do it, for the love of essentrics.

Okay!  I did 9 ceiling reaches, which is a little over half of the recommended dosage.  The process involves much stretching, as promised, and a lot of breathing.  Both good for you.  I went on to the Hamstring Stretches and discovered I could actually do them, even though the pictures had made me extremely skeptical.  Then there’s a bunch more leg stretches and pretzel positions, much like I remember getting entirely frustrated about when I tried yoga a hundred years ago. You are supposed to stop if you experience pain.  Excellent rule.

The Open Chest Swan Sequence for Posture is my favourite, so far.  Except I had to keep getting out of the various positions to tap the kindle to turn the pages.  There are nine steps involved.  The whole procedure is supposed to take about 30 seconds to get through.  HAHA!  By this time my 30 minutes was up.  How the hell did that happen?  And my arms felt like lead weights were attached to them.  So I quickly went through some lunges, noting that I was making almost all of the common mistakes so helpfully noted and illustrated.  Then I did a few side leg lifts, just to see if was possible.

She lost me at the modified sit ups.  I’m saving those for tomorrow.  Or whenever I happen to get to them within the allotted 30 minute time frame.  I’m excited about the zombie position and spine rotation and plies.  There are also Squash Lunges and Barre Footwork things and frankly I don’t know what else yet.  No wonder she put all this at the back of the book to give us lots of time to think about it.

Anyway, it all looks awesome!  And like being double jointed is not a requirement!  I feel like I stretched a few muscles that I didn’t even know I had.  I don’t think the eighth of January is too late to spontaneously come up with a sort of resolution.  I would really like to keep this up. I felt virtuous and proud and down right energized making my ridiculously healthy smoothie after I was done.  There are also pain relief exercises and things to do for balance and mobility.

Looks like a good book!  And like it or not, I will try to keep you posted with my newly young stretched out fingers and admirable computer desk posture.  Hey, those are good goals too.

Winter Weather Jots

For those of you who don’t already know it, this month is officially Just Jot it January, or JusJoJan.  See, I have the sign to prove it.  You can even click on it for the link.

It is also cold outside, and I have proof of that too because I took a screen shot.

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My new weather network app informed me this clear sunny Sunday morning that the temperature outside was -34 C, feels like -43 C.  So it’s gotten considerably better since then, right?  Except that the early dark always makes me feel colder.

I got rid of my old weather app because it always showed me a pretty rural landscape which appeared to have inclement weather happening somewhere in front of it, or off to the side with little actual effect on the blue sky and green grass.  There was also a big bold and annoying sign hanging in the sky telling me how lovely the premium features of this app would prove to be if only I would decide to purchase the upgrade.  So I deleted it instead.

I live with a weatherman, and the app is just a heads up, so that when he stands in front of me looking out the window to inform me that it’s snowing, I can say I already knew that.  Today of all days he decided he had to get out of the house and do something.  So all by myself I have had to figure out that it’s snowing heavily in B.C. and there is dangerous freezing rain in the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland has some crazy winds going on.

It’s a very good day for all sane Canadians to stay inside and read a good book I think.  This thought brings us all the way back around in a circle to the first prompt theme for JusJoJan which happens to be Reading.  See how I did that?  But, back to the jotting part, the rules state that we can also jot down random thoughts and share them.

Being currently in a very share-y mood and a chronic haver of random thoughts, I decided to go through my list of the puzzling things I have on my notebook phone app.  Little pieces of paper can go missing or be thrown away.  These, on the other hand, tend to accumulate and defy deletion.

1.  dates, rice flour, coconut, espresso powder? (I think the question mark indicates that I feared not being able to find such a thing because it might not exist)

2.  sit in the fridge for 10 minutes (recipe instructions that cracked me up)

3.  4:20 pick up time 23rd (I believe that was about a bus on holidays.  You don’t want to miss a holiday bus.)

4.  Appt at 1, be there 15 min early, allow for traffic and parkade and bicycle accidents (Good advice I guess)

5.  A little mini list of my grandchildren and each of their birthdays.  (I remember doing this one, because I got tired of being asked their ages and having to be vague about it.  Bad grandma.)

6.  Scrubber Vileda (because brand names are hard to remember)

7.  A long and involved recipe for  Lebkuchen  (although I’m not even sure what that is)

8.  Sorry, I was busy expanding my inner bliss in to the universe. (Always put you excuses in writing)

9.  Glop is a valid scrabble word (Who knew?  Probably every scrabble player but me)

10.  De-calcify pineal gland (what?)

There’s  more than ten, but you probably don’t care what my cell phone bill amounts are.  Or the prices of organic produce.  Frankly, neither do I, once the moment has passed.

Well, that’s entirely enough jotting for one day.  There will be a new prompt on the 10th.  I’m sure I will be able to flub my way through that one too.  Or glop.  I could also glop.  Maybe I should jot that down.