Link love

A Simple Method for Checking Student Vocab Comprehension During Tests

https://nitter.net/nycsouthpaw/status/1707394987539722646#m

Ask the grumpies: Where to make new friends as an adult?

Debbie M asks:

Do you have good places to meet like-minded people? Some place my friends have found a second home include:
* the Society for Creative Anachronism (play-acting medieval times) – people meet for sword fighting and wearing costumes and ancient sewing and jewelry techniques, etc.
* Ultimate frisbee – people competing all over the country just stay at each other’s houses when they travel for tournaments
* a local “no kidder” group of people who don’t want children and don’t want to talk about them all the time
* the Rebel badge group – adults working on badges in books written for adults by a woman in the UK
* gaming groups
* cosplay groups
* juggling groups
* ballroom dance clubs
I’m part nerd (but into social sciences rather than natural sciences, programming, or engineering), part hippie, part Girl Scout, and no single group feels like my people since college and grad school.

Given that literally all of our non-work adult friends have moved away, you have a much better answer to this question than I do!  #2 basically has kept friends from previous lives and met new people through them.

Grumpy Nation:  Given we’ve completely punted on this question, where do you meet new people?

Harry Potter

This is a post that was started in 2013– long before any of us knew what a horrible person JK Rowling was!

The first two Harry Potter books came out in college.  I’d actually read the first book before everybody started talking about it.  DH (then boyfriend) had picked it up with summer money he felt he had to spend (this was back when he had money he spent it all), and I read it while visiting.  It turned out to be a much better purchase than the nuclear physics textbook he bought at the same time.

The second book came out soon after I’d finished the first.

We also read the third book when it came out.

We even waited in line for the fourth book!

We saw a midnight showing of the first movie in a fancy theater we had to drive out to see.  We loved it except one dull scene where there was too much looking out the window for pathos.  I put the dvd on my Amazon wishlist and my MIL bought it for me at Christmas.

We saw the second movie in the theater sometime after it came out and again got the dvd for Christmas.

But… with the fourth book, we didn’t like how Harry turned from plucky boy hero to brooding angsty teen in zero time.  Either there should have been a break between books, or we should have  seen him become angsty.  Or, better yet, maybe he never should have become angsty.  I dunno, maybe teens really are plucky children one day and obnoxious whiners the next.  We weren’t.  (Update:  DC1 never became an obnoxious whiner, and the change from plucky to hipster was definitely a gradual one.  Pre-teen DC2 also has some days that are plucky child and other days that give a preview of teenagehood.)

I saved up the penultimate book for time off in the hospital after childbirth with DC1.  I enjoyed it, though I don’t think I’ve ever reread it.

We didn’t see the other movies, although the children have.  We don’t own them.

I had a hard time with the last book.  It really dragged and I wished it had had more editing.  It took a long time to finish and I didn’t really feel like it was worth it.

The kids went to Harry Potter World before the pandemic when the in-laws took everyone to Disney World.  DC2 dressed up as a Ravenclaw one Halloween.  They both had various Potter-world t-shirts gifted to them by the in-laws.

And now, in 2023, JK Rowling is awful and we can’t give her more money.  Every time she’s in the news for being horrible, I end up donating $25 to get books about trans kids to children on Donors Choose.  They have gotten a LOT of money from me.

RBO Food minus a kid plus me working full-time again plus DH dieting

• We eat a lot less bread with DC1 gone.
• Oddly, DC2 seems to have upped hir fizzy water consumption to make up for DC1 being gone, which I didn’t think possible since DC2 is in school most of the day!
• We knew DC1 drank about half a gallon of milk a week.  We didn’t realize zie ate a full pack of sliced cheese.
• DH is currently counting calories and watching his weight.  He’s not doing anything unhealthy, just not eating to excess.  When he doesn’t pay attention, he eats a lot more calories.  There’s always some adjustment when DH decides to pay attention again, but this time it’s combined with the loss of a full 16 year old.
• Menu planning has been difficult under the new regime.
• Previously I had 4 books and one Cook’s Country magazine subscription that I was getting a recipe for each day from and we had something from my list of easy things (ex. scrambled eggs, grilled cheese, chili, spaghetti, etc.) and something from either the freezer or the pantry for other meals.  We’d cook fresh veggies and difficult things on the weekend and quicker stuff and things that wouldn’t go bad throughout the week.
• Our meals have a lot more leftovers now.  After DC1 left, I just didn’t do any menu planning for 3 weeks before we ran out of things to make.  (I plan a week ahead, so we had what used to be a week and a half to get through.)
• DC2 has activities on Monday and Tuesday so we either have leftovers or something from the freezer (generally frozen pizza or frozen lasagna).
• My first solution was to temporarily table the Italian Cooking for Dummies book.  It’s great, but the recipes tend to take longer and make a lot.  We can bring it back when DC1 returns.
• That still wasn’t enough.  We haven’t completely solved the problem, but I’m being more careful about making sure we don’t get too many fresh ingredients that could go bad.
• A small part of me is like maybe we should just cook one meal and eat out once a week and eat leftovers the rest of the week.  But I think DC1 didn’t really eat *that* much, it just seems like it because we haven’t hit equilibrium yet.
• Knowing that we’re going to be making fewer new things each week means that I’ve also become a lot more picky about what we do make– I no longer just pick the next thing in the book.  For example, we’d made shrimp toasts from the Chinese book about a month ago, and the next recipe (that didn’t require a ton of crab legs) in that section was the same shrimp paste deep fried, but as balls wrapped in wonton noodles instead of on toast.  It was good, but also kind of a hassle and we knew what it would taste like, so I just skipped to the next one (bbq ribs… though we’d already tried that bbq sauce before and liked it, but it was different enough and not as hard to make).  Previously I wouldn’t have done that.  Being picky also requires a bit more thinking than my mostly automated process did.
• We haven’t had a new nuts.com order for ourselves in a while.  Our pantry is starting to get overloaded with crackers and cereal (I’ve started removing them from our regular order).
• We are apparently eating the same amount of fruit as before.  DC2 loves fruit and veggies, but apparently DC1 did not snack on them.
• We have been eating a lot of asparagus at DC2’s request.
• DC1 says the college cafeteria is really spotty.  Sometimes the potatoes will be great, but sometimes they won’t be cooked all the way through.  Instead of undocumented immigrants like many colleges (I’ve been to several campuses where cafeteria worker rights became a big political issue), they use a lot of work study students as cafeteria workers.  It’s the worst work study job available and freshmen are assigned to it.  After a couple of weeks they all quit.
• Our grocery bill is about $100 less per week than it had been, which is pretty insane.

Link love

We got what initially looked like a phishing email but turns out no, Booking.com got hacked, possibly multiple times. DH had to call their customer service to get a booking from his email address cancelled. Apparently his account was already locked. (And it was a truly secure random password only used for that site, so nobody guessed the password or got it from another place.)

You can order 4 free covid test kits on Monday from the government.

Ask the grumpies: Embarrassed by nice house?

Alice asks:

I feel awkward about new people seeing our house, to the point at which I feel uncomfortable about inviting others over. I think it’s because we paid more than I wanted to for it and then the value went up. We bought this house because it fit a very narrow intersection of what my husband and I both wanted, and we love it and feel fortunate that we got it. But I feel so weird about it from a social standpoint. We were able to buy it because of my income and my insane saving habits when I was younger. It’s not some amazing mansion, but it’s on a large plot of land and I worry that my kid’s friends’ parents (who I would like to at least be friendly with) are going to look at it and think that we’re rich jerks or something. I feel like I need to find a bridge across this in my own head, both for my kid’s social life and my own. I would like to have friends and invite people over! I would like for her to have friends who come over!

What advice do people have for someone who feels awkward about this sort of thing?

When I initially started reading the question I thought it was going to be about having to clean before inviting people over and that one I don’t have a good answer to, just sympathy.

But I get this– I grew up lower middle-class economically (though highly educated– genteel lower middle class), and I also felt guilty when we were able to buy a really nice house right out of graduate school with the money we’d saved by not paying rent for two years as Resident Assistants.  Like, this house is twice as nice as the houses we grew up in and is a level above “starter house.”  Our master bathroom is literally the same size as our entire first apartment in terms of square feet.  Literally.

My advice is two-fold.

First:  People are probably not judging you as much as you think they are.  Your kids’ friends will have various levels of housing and car spending and vacation spending and so on.  If you don’t brag about your trips and the cars in your garage/driveway aren’t constantly fancy and new they’ll probably just think you have a nice house and leave it at that. In addition, they may have seen nicer houses than yours, so although your house is nice and may be the nicest in your experience (as mine was in mine), it’s a little bit of a let-down realizing that many of the people that you know and socialize with either came from money and grew up someplace nicer or themselves live someplace nicer now.  Probably not the majority of people you know, but definitely some people who send their kids to public schools, particularly in neighborhood based public schools.

Basically, the realization that a lot of people don’t think we’re all that was a bit of a shock when we grew up on the other side of things.  I was amazed at the houses of people in the rich part of town, but a lot of people are used to that standard of living or better.  #2, for example, grew up in a ritzy suburb and had much higher housing standards than what I grew up with and thinks we have a nice house but not anything particularly special, particularly given that it’s in this part of the country.  (DH wasn’t amazed with the rich people houses in his town because even though his house was just a small 70s-style two bedroom ranch with a furnished basement with bedrooms for the kids, it was/is actually one of the nicest houses in his tiny town.)

This kind of guilt is one of the consequences of changing socioeconomic status— guilt about things that are middle or upper middle class, when the people who grew up that way or better are completely free from thinking it anything other than what’s normal.  Instead of feeling guilt, they feel sorry for people with less if they ever come in contact with them or think about them at all, which they probably don’t very often.  (Or if they’re evil, they assume that people with less stuff have too much as it is!)

Second:  As we’ve gotten older other people have gotten nicer houses and our stuff has gotten shabby (without being chic) so it’s much less of a concern. I’m actually embarrassed to have people over right now because we really need to replace our seriously cat-scratched and otherwise destroyed pleather furniture.  (Cat pee + plus cleaning = torn seats.)  We really should do that but I’m lazy and neither DH nor I are particularly into home decor.  But hiring someone to tell us what couches to buy also seems dumb.  We may end up getting new couch cushions made and our ottoman re-upholstered rather than starting from scratch just so we don’t have to make any decisions.  I think there’s a place the next town over that does stuff like that but it will probably cost more than just buying entirely new couches.  (DH ended up reupholstering a chair seat cushion himself a while back because it seemed cost prohibitive to get someone else to do it.)

If you just wait a bit and have normal wear and tear you can balance out the nice house with crappy furniture.  And then you’ll have the opposite problem!

Grumpy Nation– what advice do you have for Alice?

 

RBOC

• There seems to be a spate of divorces, both IRL and online.  Georgia Dunn of Breaking Cat News.  The Frugal Girl.  And then people that we’ve known.  The IRL divorces are kind of sordid and messy and make one half of each couple look pretty terrible.  Fortunately not people we are still close to, but surprising all the same.
• And then one of DH’s relatives kids should get divorced (or even annulled since the actual living together marriage did not last very long at all), but neither she nor her legal husband can be bothered to fill out the paperwork even though they’ve both moved on to other live-in significant others.  This seems crazy to me, and somehow staying legally married when not actually married makes it seem like marriage is less valued as an institution than a divorce would have.  Which is kind of ironic.
• Marriage, is, of course, just a contract granting various legal protections and restrictions.  But.. I’m still kind of a romantic at heart.
• I’d like to comment on the spate of positive Covid diagnoses, but hopefully that will have died down by the time this post is published (probably 3 weeks from this writing). (Update: swapped posts)
• I’ve gotten to the age where my mom making howdy doody references is me except with like Emeril Lagasse.  (Bam!)
• DC1 seems to be settling in at college, which is good.
• DC2 took PE because it’s required this semester, but is enjoying it so much, zie asked to swap art next semester for PE.  DC2 is really into art, but said that the middle school class seems to be one of those where they don’t teach any techniques, just creativity and zie can do creativity on hir own.  Zie hasn’t been impressed with their output.
• Minnesota has a neat state law that specifically allows minors to get vaccines without parental permission, which is good because the Covid booster came out after DC1 left for college.
• We got to Walgreens after checking the cdc page and the vaccines.com page and signing up online to get our 11 year old a Covid booster only to be told that there are no vaccines for Covid for under 12, which is not true.  I’m irritated because their website and vaccines.gov which got emptied and updated when the vaccines were changed still says that walgreens does age 6+.  And if we’d known last week we would have called the pediatricians office last week instead of making an appointment for Walgreens.
• DH and I have been boosted at least, not that we need it as much as DC2 does.
• DC1 isn’t getting boosted until mid October because zie doesn’t want to walk 15 min off campus to Walgreens, so zie is waiting until the on-campus clinic.  So far it looks like cases aren’t crazy in Minnesota. (As of mid-September…)
• pediatrician also doesn’t have Covid shots for kids yet.  I can’t find any info on why not or if this is just a local problem or what.  DC2 hasn’t gotten covid yet and really needs that booster.
• more people getting positive Covid tests around me…

The perfect wedding (from the guest’s perspective)

Another incomplete draft from 2013

Beware the hangry!

Long pauses, I hates dem.

You will note that link no longer works.

But hey, this is good timing because my sister is getting married!

So, in my opinion, the best wedding ceremonies are short!  I personally like it when there are heart-felt personal bits, but in my own wedding we just used the shortest options available in the Book of Common Prayer.  #2 had a much more fun wedding with fun music, personalized vows, etc.  But not super lengthy.

Then, if there’s going to be a wait between the ceremony and the reception (often because of pictures), then there needs to be food available!  Have appetizers!

Um… those are really my only big pet peeves.  #2 doesn’t like long breaks between ceremony and reception.  I didn’t have any break– people just walked over to where the food was ready, but she had some nice catered hors d’oeurvres and drinks while we caught up with friends from high school.

Let’s see other stuff…

Good food.  Stuff to drink even if it isn’t alcoholic.  Bars where you have to pay are tacky.

Music, but not so loud people have to scream to talk.  At my BIL’s wedding, lots of people hung out in the parking lot because indoors was too loud.  That shouldn’t happen.

Also, it’s kind of a drag when a member of the wedding party is freaking out about every little detail, like the mother of the bride stressing over the candles on the tables being different length.  Nobody cares!  But they do pick up on the stress.

Grumpy Nation, what are your favs and peeves re: weddings?  

Link love

new Covid boosters are available! https://www.vaccines.gov

this donors choose (with a book about being transgender) is currently being matched https://www.donorschoose.org/project/classroom-library/7700377/

Van Gogh painting stolen in 2020 returned

Ask the grumpies: Quick, easy, healthy, breakfast recipes

Scientist on the Roof asks:

I am looking for easy, quick, healthy breakfast recipes. Make-ahead type stuff is good, too. No food allergies here, but really want to start with simple natural ingredients – and minimal processed food.  One of my kids is underweight, so lots of calories/butter/carbs is good.  The family is not very picky, but we all like variety. And everyone is pretty tired of fried eggs and scrambled eggs.

This is going to be a good question for grumpy nation, as we tend to be pretty repetitive about breakfasts, even though we generally crave food variety for other meals.

I will say that our doctor has said throughout DC1’s underweight life that zie seems generally healthy and is growing.  Some kids are skinny and healthy and so long as healthy food is always available and there’s no psychological problems, that’s fine.  But I get that what you’re saying is there’s no limits on calories.

Let’s see, this morning I had a slice of chocolate cardamom walnut banana bread that DH made this past weekend.  There are a lot of marginally healthy quickbreads out there, generally of the kind that is vegetable or fruit heavy.  Your zucchini and other squash/pumpkin breads, apple breads, etc.  Be careful not to use so much sugar that you’re actually serving cake for breakfast, and consider using 50-100% whole grain.  You can also go fat/protein with various kinds of cheese breads or by putting bits of ham in– these additions work well with yeast breads.

Muffins are also make-aheadable.  See above for quickbreads, but put them in muffin tins.

We’re big into muesli, and our grocery store currently has several versions (though they no longer carry my favorite imported from Germany). Related to that is Bircher, which is basically muesli and shredded apple soaked in nut-milk overnight, which we found out about from reading Boyfriend Material and turns out to be really good and quite filling.  (Overnight oats are similar but not as good, IMHO.)

Breakfast burritos/tacos/quesadillas are pretty quick.  Yes, there’s eggs, but there’s also melted cheese and salsa.  (And if you’re super fancy, meat and potato!)

I do a lot of eating leftovers for breakfast.  Cold pizza is always fantastic.

Sometimes I’ll get a loaf of sprouted bread from the grocery store and eat it as toast for the week, either with butter or cream cheese.

Toast with peanut butter, with or without honey and banana.

Avocado toast.

Ricotta toast.

One of my cookbooks recommends beans for breakfast.  Apparently it’s the least gassy way to eat them.  I think Wheezy Waiter has some kind of bean/salsa thing for breakfast every morning with some fruit on the side, but I may be misremembering.

I like watching youtube videos of breakfasts around the world (much of the world is savory), but a lot of places seem to have breakfasts that take longer than I have to make in the morning.

Before leaving for college, DC1 was on an oatmeal kick.  Rolled oats, made in the microwave according to the direction on the Quaker Oats box (for some reason the store-brand is currently more expensive than the name brand) with various dried fruits and nuts and spices added.  DC2 is currently eating a lot of raisin bran.

Can’t go wrong with a banana, though that’s often not enough.  But a banana and a grilled cheese sandwich can keep one going until lunch.  Larabars are also nice in a time crunch.

When we’re being fancy, we sometimes make Strata, which comes in both meat and spinach varieties.  It’s basically a savory bread casserole.

I like meat in buns/pastry.  Like kolaches or toad in the hole or scotch eggs or empanadas or …  Every culture has a couple of versions of these and you can make them in advance and freeze them.  Sometimes we’ll make bbq pork buns using our lovefeast bun recipe as the bread.

Waffles freeze well.  Pancakes aren’t that more more time to make than eggs.  You can healthify these various ways, like by putting banana, pumpkin puree, or berries in and suggesting kids use nut butter instead of (or in addition to) syrup.

Yogurt!  Parfait or without.  A little jam and some granola really do wonders for unsweetened full fat organic yogurt.  I like cottage cheese just plain without jam.

Smoothies/acai bowls, though I almost never want these for breakfast unless it’s really hot and the a/c isn’t helping.  Still, they’re not so difficult to make if you have an immersion blender and access to a supermarket that sells the frozen fruit stuff.

Biscuits and gravy are yummy and probably only a little harder to make than scrambled eggs.

If your grocery or TJ’s has pre-made shakshuka it’s easy to heat it up and crack some eggs to poach in it.  Making it from scratch is pretty time-consuming though (but also delicious!)

Grumpy Nation:  What do you like for breakfasts?