Vinegar Appreciation Society: I think vinegar is my favorite ingredient right now. Not balsamic. Just plain white vinegar. You can't really replace it and it can change things a lot - things that taste flat can just pop when you add vinegar.
I think telemarketing made us assholes. Today I was smoking a small pork shoulder and the phone rang. I clean up my hands and the caller ID said it was a newspaper. I am inclined to take these calls, because sometimes they are polls and I like participating in them. No, it was for a subscription to a newspaper I don't remember us ever receiving. I politely declined, she persisted, and persisted, and persisted. Seriously. There was something vaguely dehumanizing about the whole thing. It felt like we were battling for scraps of something.
Weed your garden: My grandma - my dad's mom - died 5 years ago. With the inheritance, my mom re-landscaped the yard. I hated it, my sister hated it, my brother hated it. It was an expensive, stupid purchase. It looked fine the first year and they fixed a drainage issue in the backyard. But today I hate it even more, because my mom doesn't take care of the yard. My dad has a stupid hot tub to take of (no one has used it in a couple of years). The most basic maintenance - weeding - doesn't get done. Ever. So to give myself something to do, that's been my project over past couple of weeks. The lesson is this: do not use inheritance money for something that you have no intention of taking care of.
Last year I wrote an essay for a scholarship. I did not get it - one of my friends actually won it. I feel quite good about it, though, since my predictions about municipal financial problems, up to and including default and bankruptcy, are proving to be a weight on the recovery, given how many people work for them.
