All posts by Dona

Heart healthy, but dead, ants

Humor, , ,

So last night I walked into the kitchen after the kids were in bed, expecting the dishes to be done and the counters cleaned off.

(Yeah right, I have teenagers)

Anyway, I’d noticed earlier that the counter was wiped down and expected it to still be that way. But no, Clare had a pomegranate snack and left several puddles of sticky-sweet pomegranate juice and some pomegranate skin on the counter. And the ants discovered it. Not a couple big ants, no we had multitudes of microscopic light brown ants slurping up pomegranate juice.  I could almost hear their tiny ant voices extolling the virtues of pomegranate juice for their little insect hearts.

Annoyed, I grabbed a sponge and wiped up the mess, including the ants, rinsed out the sponge and ran the garbage disposal. It took a few swipes, but I was finally satisfied that the majority of ants were off the counter, at least.  Then I ran the dishwasher and walked upstairs.

Clare’s light was still on, so I stopped and told her that she should have wiped the counter off after eating the pomegranate. She told me that the pomegranate had been covered in ants and since she didn’t want to kill the ants, she filled the sink with water, submerged the pomegranate in it until the ants floated away. Then she lovingly scooped up the ants and gently placed them on the counter.  She left the puddles of pomegranate juice there so they would have something to eat after their harrowing adventure.

Oh, I told her, too bad I just wiped them up and threw them down the garbage disposal.

She called me a cold hearted ant-murderer. Oops.

To her credit, she didn’t want to waste the pomegranate, but I suggested that next time, sacrifice the fruit to save the ants by tossing the whole thing out the door. (but then we might have other visitors again)

Speaking of pomegranates, I bought 6 at Costco last week. Dean thinks I was crazy, but the kids (and apparently the ants) like them and they are supposed to be good for you. Granted, they are difficult to eat.

When I was deciding if I wanted to buy 6 pomegranates another woman was looking at them at Costco. She said that she’d eaten pomegranates every day of her life, but still was not sure how to tell if they were ripe. I think she was from a different country. For sure she wasn’t from the Midwest United States where pomegranates didn’t arrive until sometime in the early 1970’s and only then as an exotic fruit – at least in my hometown, and only at one grocery store.

I remember my first pomegranate. I was 21 and working at a “Pancake House”  located just down from Gromers – the grocery store mentioned above. Another waitress and I, and perhaps a couple of busboys went shopping one day after work and thought we’d try some of the exotic fruit. We bought a mango, a pomegranate and a quince and shared them at someone’s house, or perhaps in someone’s car. I don’t remember eating the mango, but I remember the quince was astringent and the pomegranate was juicy, full of glistening sweet red juicy seeds at the center of which was a hard, almost wooden, pit. As interesting as the pomegranate was, it was too unusual for my taste, and probably too expensive. I don’t think I had another until recently when my daughter started wanting to taste one.

Ubuntu

Technology

I’ve wanted to try to install Linux on a computer for years – ever since a friend told me about it back in 1998 – just to say I did. I’ve never actually done it though. I played around with Ubuntu a few months ago, but couldn’t remember how to set up a computer to boot from a cd and didn’t want to risk damaging any data on either of my two working PCs.

Today I finally dragged out my old gateway and thought I’d give Ubuntu a go on that. I was able to download the image file from the Ubuntu site and burn it on a disk. I played with it a little on my laptop – just to see how it would work. I don’t think my dvd-rom is that good, however, because it seemed to go very slowly.

I just booted the old gateway computer with the Ubuntu CD (figured how to change the boot-order) and when it tried to install came up with several hundred error messages. I guess either the CD image didn’t burn correctly or else the computer is just too messed up. Pity. I really wanted to try it out.

Edited an hour later – it never worked on the old computer, but I am using the live session option with my laptop to write this. Got online and am exploring the operating system. I might just install it on my laptop if I can figure out how to partition the second drive.

Hiptop Halloween Hunt

Events, , ,

I’m not a big fan of Halloween for many reasons. Masks scare me if I don’t know who is behind them, and sometimes even when I know who is behind the mask. I also don’t appreciate people coming to my house and demanding things.  As a former teacher, Halloween and the day after were some of the hardest days to teach. The kids were high on Halloween with excitement and high on sugar the day after Halloween. Finally, the first several years of my kids’ lives I felt compelled to find them perfect costumes. I don’t sew, but one year made a cat in the hat costume for my daughter – I even made the hat out of fabric I painted, sewed and hardened with fabric stiffener. That was the same year I made a Peter Pan costume for my son. Unbelievable now, I know!

There are a few Halloween traditions I do like, however. I like leftover candy. And I like the Hiptop Halloween Hunt.

I bought a Sidekick when they first came out around 2002 and have had one ever since. A few years ago an energetic young man put together a Halloween photo scavenger hunt. This young man may have actually invented mobile photo blogging – or at least was in on it at the very beginning when he began Hiptop Nation.  I participated in the second and third hunts that Mike organized. I forgot about it last year, but Mike emailed me before the hunt this year and suggested I join his team. I’d briefly thought about joining this year, but would have probably forgotten about it had I not heard from Mike. Even if I’d remembered, I might have chosen not to participate, but since the creator of the experience (who stepped down last year to be a participant instead of the organizer) invited me to be on his team, I couldn’t resist.

So I cleared my schedule somewhat for October 31 and when the list came online, started snapping photos. I’m not a real outgoing person, but since I dragged my daughter along to the mall to get some shots, she forced me to be more aggressive than I normally would. (The cherry picker shot was her idea and she bullied me until I went along with it.)

The two shots I am proudest of are the Apple store employees. We were lucky that one of the employees was talking to someone who happened to have his Sidekick LX out. I asked if he would mind letting the Apple Store employee hold it so I could get a photo. The list rules said that I needed to be in the shot too, so I thought I would get no points for this. Luckily the judges took pity on me and gave me full credit for both shots.

I’m not sure I’ll participate next year. I’m getting a little old for this. In fact, I’m willing to bet I was the oldest person doing the hunt. Maybe that’s why the judges cut me some slack.