Chokemeal

Woke up early and hungry the other morning, so I sleepily made my way to the kitchen to fix my usual breakfast, some McCann’s Quick and Easy Steel Cut Irish oatmeal.  I've been buying the fast cooking kind because it has the same amount of fiber as the regular and it's much faster to prepare.

I flicked on the switch and the light bulb came on, made a "pop" then went out. (and that always startles me, even though it's not a loud noise...must be something to do with my innate fear of electricity) I had some light bulbs, but couldn't see them because it was dark.  (much the same way when I look for my glasses after laying them down somewhere.  It's hard for me to find them because I can't see without my glasses!)

That was OK, though, because I've made the same thing hundreds of times before and the light from the lamp in the next room was just enough to let me barely make out what I was doing.  By feel, I flicked on the hot water kettle, got a bowl and put in exactly 1/4 cup of the oatmeal, sprinkled a little Splenda and a dash of cinnamon on top.  The kettle boiled, then clicked off and I poured enough water to cover the oatmeal.   I didn't need to measure because, as I said, I've done the same thing plenty of times before.

I gave it a stir, covered the bowl with a saucer to keep in the heat, then grabbed a handful of blueberries from the fridge and a banana from the bunch I had just purchased.  I put the blueberries in a coffee mug, then poured some hot water on them to rinse, poured out the water, then covered them again with hot water so they would be warm when I added them to the oatmeal. 

Coming back into my bedroom, I got on my computer, checked my email and such, giving my oatmeal about five minutes to absorb the water and get soft enough to eat.  After the required time, I went and retrieved my breakfast and the cup of blueberries and banana and brought them back to my computer desk.  I dumped in the berries, then cut up the banana into tiny slices and added them to the bowl. (I like to have a bite of banana with every spoonful)

Giving a quick stir to my breakfast, I filled up the spoon for my first food of the day.   My nose gave me a second's warning, but my reflexes aren't so great in the a.m. and I shoveled a heaping teaspoon of the oatmeal into my mouth.

Did you know chili powder and cinnamon look an awful lot alike in near darkness?

Hot Mel

Here's another mail that hit my spam folder.  At first, it looked real;  it had the official WindowsLive logo and since my Hotmail acct. had been hacked several months ago, it alarmed me.  After looking at the body of the message, I knew it was a phishing attempt.

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 Dear ,

We have recently detected an unusual activity on your account .

WindowsLive has placed a hold on your e-mail account untill this issue will be resolved.

To ensure that your e-mail service is not interupted, please confirm your information with us, by following the link below :

(URL deleted)

We are sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused.

© WindowsLive 2012

WindowsLive is working 24/7 to ensure the protection of your account.
This e-mail may contain confidential and/or priviliged information. In case you are not the intented recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified not to read , distribute , disclose or otherwise use this transmision. If you have received this e-mail in error , please notify the sender immediately and then delete this e-mail/transmission from your system

---

I deleted the URL, but it wasn't a valid one, anyway - it was masked.  Hovering over it with the cursor, I saw a different URL, one that went to a PHP page on imenasa.com.

Not sure why anyone would want to get into my Hotmail account;  I never use it for online financial transactions.  In fact, it's the address I give when I have to give an email addy for free samples or when I don't believe the site when they say they will keep my information private.  I checked the account the other day after not signing in for a couple of months and there were a half dozen newsletters I had never bothered to cancel when I pretty much quit using Hotmail and went to Gmail and there were over a thousand mails in the spam folder.

I should have noticed it was a phishing attempt from the get-go, as the reply to address was Hotmail Team services@hotmel.co.uk

Hotmel?

That reminded me of someone I used to know, a guy named Mel who was a derrick hand on a drilling rig I worked on a long time ago.  Mel was anti-social and didn't like the other hands visiting with him in the mud house .(where the derrick hand mixed the drilling mud/fluid)  That was OK; it was during the summer and the nights were hot, so there was no need to get in out of the cold like there was during the winter.  I can't remember the details, but I didn't work too long on that rig.

It was several months later and I was behind a rather large and hairy woman in line at a neighborhood convenience store. She was dressed fairly nice - a white blouse with blue trim and a short white skirt and was wearing nylons. As "she" turned around, I saw that it was Mel!   Trying my best to remain nonchalant, I spoke with him a little bit, reminded him that we had worked together on the rig.  He was a lot more cordial than he had been on that job. He asked what I was doing now, I asked the same and that was about it. He said goodbye and walked out the door, a little rocky on his high heels.

I turned to pay for my items and the clerk was staring at me, her mouth wide open.  "You know that guy?" she asked with an incredulous look on her face.  "Yeah." I told her.  "We roughnecked together on a drilling rig.".

She shook her head in disbelief.  "Can you believe the way he was dressed?"

"Disgraceful." I told her and she nodded in agreement, still looking astonished.  I went on:

"Wearing white after Labor Day.  Disgraceful."

Yup, Mel looked pretty hot from the back until you noticed the matted hair under his stockings.  When he turned around, it was another story.

Edit to add: I am Facebook friends with a local woman.  Looking through her friends list, I noticed Mel was her friend.  I messaged her and asked if he still liked to "dress up".  She wrote back, saying she had heard he had done that, but she never had seen him cross-dressing.  She said he was a devout Christian now.

Cheating Women

Just got this email in my spam folder:

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lonelyhousewife996@aol.com
lonelywife655@set.irisjuniper.com

Local Profiles of Cheating Women for (my email addy)

Browse Local Profiles of Cheating Women
You've Been Approved for a FREE PASS:
(URL deleted)

---

Why would I want someone that everyone else has already had?

Free pass? No thanks, believe I'll pass.

Amazed by Stupidity

There was a post on the Amarillo Globe-News Facebook page about a woman who had been bitten by a brown recluse spider while in the Amarillo Rick Husband airport. The article didn't so much question that the bite occurred, only wondering why it took five months for the UK Mail Online story to report it.

Personally, I believe it happened and don't know/don't care why it took so long to be reported. What bothered me was a couple of comments on the Facebook page by some doofus who took offense at the story.

I'm a friend of a person who knows the victim of the spider bite personally. It happened. Quit being a crappy news source.

First of all, I don't think the guy read the story: My spidey sense is all messed up. He seems a little too defensive about the way it was reported. The author of the article did some investigating and neither the city manager nor the manager of the airport knew anything about the incident.

Be that as it may, the guy who was overly defensive didn't construct a sentence very well. In the above quote, it sounds like he personally knew the spider bite. Now, I'm often guilty of fracturing grammar usage, so it would be hypocritical of me to criticize him for making a simple error in his sentence construction. No, what annoyed me about the guy was him commenting after several other comments and saying this:

You people amaze me with stupidity.

Dictionary.com defines amaze as:
1. to overwhelm with surprise or sudden wonder; astonish greatly.
2. Obsolete. to bewilder; perplex.

Why would stupidity "amaze" you? I can understand using "dismays", "surprises" or any other number of adjectives or verbs, but "amaze"? There's a LOT of stupidity in the world - why would you be amazed at it? Wouldn't that make you a little bit stupid yourself?

I'll admit I'm sometimes amazed at the sheer volume of stupidity...amazed that such stupid people somehow manage to get on the internet. What really amazes me is that there are 10,200,000 results on Google for "amaze me with stupidity". Hope that Google link works.

I'll feel really stupid if it doesn't.

Soylent Tofu

Earlier, I opened up my reader to find several hundred recipes from my foodgawker feed. Along with the other recipe sites I subscribe to, it's often overwhelming to sort through them all. I might not open every post, but I do like to scan the titles for interesting recipes and sometimes go to the website and save them. Far too often the most intriguing recipes are in another language and there's no translator widget on the page. Also, the ingredients are in metric measurements and it's just too much trouble to convert. It's much easier to just Google the recipe and find an English version.

Quickly looking over the titles, I stopped on one - I couldn't believe what I saw! I've always been slightly dyslexic and sometimes it makes for a confusing moment...and a few seconds later, a laugh out loud one.

I thought it said "Human Tofu"

(if you don't get the post title reference or haven't seen the movie: Soylent Green)

Even though I had heard of Hunan, a province of South-Central China, known for its three styles of cuisine, I didn't read it that way.

Here's the recipe that I misread.

Splitter

A fun but frustrating game.  Use the knife (click and drag) to create a chain reaction and get your smiley face (on the tether/joint) to the exit and collect stars along the way. You can split joints and wood objects only. You're not limited to just one knife cut, but each level has a different limit.

The first one is fairly easy, but they get harder as you get to the next levels. Thank goodness for restarts!

Splitter