Life after Work

... or "intermission", continued!

I have no idea why I've been documenting my recent kitchen adventures with such enthusiasm... So far there are now 21 pix in the Facebook album I've devoted to this topic ... today yesterday (it *is* 2am!) I was particularly proud of the impromptu lunch which involved juggling three pots/pans on the stove to produce egg noodles alfredo with a side of salmon sauteed with onion & veggies. follow this link for the album, recent photos at the end.

... final installment on the "throwaway" "series" soon!!

... we take a break from the throwaway series to bring you this picture:



That, dear reader(s), is my first ever Waldorf Salad!

Doubled & subbed/played around a little with this recipe .... not too bad! I'd probably to it over with less salt & pepper, and perhaps sub in craisins and/or vanilla yogurt... we'll see... takes forever to work one's way through a double portion tho, be warned!

... and WHY? you ask, would I bother making this? To help Kosh and I snack on something much healthier than his Hershey Nuggets and my B&J ice cream!! It's working! Now to continue with the evening walks, and trying to hit the gym more than just once a week... :p :p

Continuing my train of thought on wastefulness... (Part One here)

PART TWO: D.U.S.T.

Yes, you read that right. Dust.

Back when I was young, every Saturday was cleaning day. With a parental unit as taskmaster, we'd use the feather duster to send dust off of the shelves into the air to fall back onto the shelves and perhaps onto the floor, which we then swept with crappy brooms that let as much dust escape as it actually swept, into a pile that was then brushed into the hand-held pan, again liberating clouds of dust back into the air, then dumped into the rubbish bag, again with the dust liberation. Cough cough! The only real way to "tame" it all was by mopping the floors. What a battle, one that was fought and lost every single weekend for *how* many years of my life??

A "cure" to all that - a dustmop! You wield it like a mop, but it's for dust! No more dust flying around! w00t!

I'd owned one for a brief period of time in Malaysia, and found it excellent: the only drawback was that of course you'd need to clean off the mop head every so often by taking off the shaggy cloth and tossing it in the washing machine. My parents inherited it when I moved back in with them, but my parent(s) didn't seem keen on it, so it stayed hidden behind a door for a few years, then disappeared when the moved to their new place. Oh well...

Moving on... Back in 2006, when Kosh and I moved in to an apartment with hardwood floors rather than carpet, whoohooo, time for a dustmop to tackle all them dust bunnies, cat hair, and my own shedding hair!!

Unfortunately I didn't give it enough thought while shopping: swayed by advertising, not wanting to deal with cleaning the mop head like before, but not thinking about the implication of buying two types of DISPOSABLE cloths, I grabbed me a Swiffer Starter Kit and a box each of dry & wet cloths.

Can you imagine my dismay when I realised just how wasteful it actually is?

There's this piece of textured cloth you fix to the flat "mop" and then do your thing, and "... when you're done cleaning, throw the cloth and all that dirt away!" Ummmm after just the one use? No frikkin' way! Seriously! No way would I be party to such wastage!!

So I used same cloth a few times rather than disposing of it after one round of Swiffering the apartment, using the dustbuster to then suck the dust off of the cloth in order to be able to continue using it.

Of course, the effectiveness of the cloth plummets after one use... so once it gets real bad, I turn the cloth over and use the other side! Not as effective as a pristine cloth, but still provides a relatively decent performance.

As a result, a box of 16 dry cloths has lasted us two years, and it's still not finished! How's that for being frugal? :) It helps that Kosh and I are, ummm, not *slobs* per se, but we're certainly not hung up about needing the place spick and span and dust-free at all times :)

On a less positive note, we had also bought a 12-count box of WET cloths for the same Swiffer mop, so that we could, you know, actually MOP the floors: now that was an utter waste! The cloth seems to run out of moisture after only a small surface area gets "mopped" ... I'm tempted to see if I can "reactivate" it by spraying water on the target floor, but I don't care enough to try; instead I just make sure I limit the wet mopping to smaller areas (just bathroom, or just kitchen, or just entryway, etc etc).

We ended up having to buy an actual mop (easy-squeeze sponge type) so that the entire apartment could get a proper moppage without going through like three of those swiffer wet cloths. So much for a 2-in-1 product!

.. .. now the question becomes: once the wet and dry cloths run out ... am I going to replace them? If nothing else, I would get another round of the dry ones, certainly not the wet ones. And if I decide to forgo the Swiffer entirely, umm, we'd have that thing sitting in a corner gathering dust on its own. Sigh. So, might as well use it, right?

... ... if I could go back to that fateful day when Kosh and I were doing our new household shopping, I'm wondering what I would decide, knowing what I know now... perhaps I would have voted to just make do with the crummy vacuum cleaner instead of a dustmop/broom to deal with the dust? (ugh noise! ugh emptying the dust bag/container!). Because the bottom line for me no brooms - i know all too well how they don't work!!

One positive thing out of the debacle? We're sticking to using Pledge (or equivalent) and a small dustcloth which we throw in with the laundry, to take dust off of stuff, rather than falling for the Swiffer Duster product!

We take the small victories where we can... :D

... the REAL reason for this series on wastage coming up next ... stay tuned!

Being half Swiss and having been exposed since very young to the frugalism that defines most of Europe (that, amusingly, here in the U.S. seems to be the stereotype for Jews!), wastefulness does grate on me.

Here in the U.S., I feel it even more keenly than elsewhere.

I understand that in many cases, what I see as wastefulness is "just" the consequence of advancement of society. Or aversion to risk (self-preservation?). Lots of other reasons.

But, most probably, it's ultimately driven by the bottom line.

Part One: FOOD

... definitely for this example, anyway!

It came as a shock to me back in the mid-90's when a friend of mine, working at the university residence hall cafeteria, shared that there was always A LOT of food left over - unserved! I'm not talking what was out at the buffet line! - and that all this food got thrown away after every meal.

Why?

Because even though the food could go to good use at any homeless shelter, the liability in case someone got sick off of the food was just way too high, so into the rubbish bins went all that food. What a waste!

Yes, I understand the risk aversion, especially in such a society where everyone sues everyone else at the drop of a hat it seems, but still... what a crying waste, eh?

... it got me wondering, back in Malaysia, how things would be in a similar situation: firstly, I wonder if the law explicitly addresses "expiration of food", or liability of "food donors" ... then again, even if such laws exist, we all know how well (more important) existing laws are upheld / implemented, riiiiight?

... I don't know about local school / university cafeterias, but isn't it whispered that many places just "recycle" their curries and other food? That's how they consistently have great flavours, right?? Ugh :p

... ... aaanyways, I digress ... this was supposed to be an intro to some recent incidents of wastefulness I've observed / taken part in ... but it's taking too long so I'm breaking it into three instead... stay tuned ... next topic is DUST followed by DVDs.

... "fresh" from a 30min stint on the elliptical ...

sweaty smiley!! [kinda ... maybe a sweaty sneer?]

Heh. I look like I have disproportionately wide shoulders vs waist. Or maybe it's just that most of my fat is situated at the FRONT/ belly? :p

For the longest time I've wanted to have a separate blogroll for "people I know / have met" but also for the longest time all I'd have on that list were fewer than 5 people, most of them being my schoolmates whom I've known since, well, school, who got bit by the blogging bug within the past 2 years or so.

But last night, that all changed.

I attended Davecago!

... and I managed to get Kosh to come along too!

The plan was to get there at 5pm, but we ran a little late, and were of course subject to the vagaries of the public transport system, arriving right at 5:30pm instead, and everyone was already there (well, one latecomer after us, but still)..

... now, I tend to exhibit the social properties of wallpaper than that of a butterfly, so arriving next-to-last made the meeting-new-people aspect of the gathering a bit daunting, especially since everyone else seemed to know each other. Thankfully in total we were about 14, so while daunting, it certainly wasn't overwhelming! :)

A few came up and greeted us immediately - Gary and RW, if I remember correctly - that was nice :) And of course Dave, who equipped us with our tags, and a deck of cards each; we also got to choose flair (see Office Space if you don't know what this is) for the lanyards, cool! (I was very amused, Kosh chose meditative dave, while I chose try evil, LoL!).

You can see them here, taking their place among the other "hanging stuff" - in case you were wondering, that thing that looks like a leather stomach is a boda bladder thingy, a souvenir from the AXSigma Barndance of '94. I have a similar (less dusty) one somewhere in my boxes in Malaysia.

... looking for the tangent, and sliding back down, back to the topic ... where were we? Ah yes, meeting people: I immediately recognised Kevin, and made it a point to greet him, and so got to meet his wife, but our circles didn't overlap much after that. Of the others present, there were one or two who seemed slightly familiar, but they most probably were channeling people I know rather than me actually recognising them, because, well, as far as I know I haven't blogrolled too many Chicago bloggers. One totally stole all our hearts, tho, as Radioactive Girl doled out bags of some radioactively delicious brownies to everyone present, yummy yum yum!

Who else was there? Jen, Mocha Momma, Leah, Mrs RW, Robin, and professional lurker Suzanne. (will be adding to / making a new blogroll... soon ... after the template revamp!!)

We started at Piece Pizza, where one of their toppings offered is actually mashed potatoes. On pizza. And believe it or not, it was actually quite good ("so says the carb fiend," chortles Kosh). The white pizza was like liquid garlic, mmMMmmmMMmmmm! After a short stop at the ice cream place across the street, we were led to Violethour: and being led certainly was required - in the spirit (haha) of the Prohibition era, its entrance is just a nondescript door in what looks like a boarded-up place; upon entering, there are these heavy velvet drapes and dim lighting, all pointing towards a pricey and pretentious establishment - wasn't too far off the mark - well at least we know it's there and we can say we've been there :) After that, we established ourselves at Salud and proceeded to down a few before Kosh and I excused ourselves - it was only 10pm but it felt really late - then again, with the outing starting at 5-ish, that was about 5 hours of socialising, no wonder we were tired!!

I'll post or point you to other bloggers' write-ups of the night. We brought a camera but the battery died after two pix, LoL, hence the attempt to include related-yet-not-of-the-event-itself images :) Like this one: me once we got back.


Keen eyes will notice I've got Davewear on :) And that I'm still clinging valiantly to shreds of anonymity by not posting full frontals / immediately recognisable pix of me. *grin!*

Blogger write-ups (will update until about a week from now):

testing out a new look!! (original here).

whaddaya think?

I think it's waaaay too blue... but I can probably tweak that... ... ... once I figure out how to play with the header to make it like the one currently in use here, with the 15+ headers randomly shown for each page load - not ready to part with that :)

And while you're there, answer the poll too, k?

Cheers, and have a auspicious 8/8/08!! :)