Nothing funny about feldspar

This Week’s Challenge: Take the two-word name of a well known city in Michigan, and its not Ann Arbor. Add the letter “E” to the first world and rearrange the letters, you’ll name something people try to avoid. Add the letter “E” to the second world and rearrange the letters, you’ll name something else people try to avoid. And here’s a hint: Both words start with the same letter, and both words end with the same letter. What’s the city and what are the words?

How many well-known two-word cities in Michigan are there?

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Plagioclase’s mother has good days and bad days. On her good days, she can get her own meals, takes an interest in the world, is willing to leave the house even if it’s only to sit in the car while we run errands.

On her bad days she’s much more difficult to deal with. She doesn’t move well in any event, so when she’s “off” she has even more problems getting around the house than usual (and in our crowded-with-several-households-worth-of-stuff house that’s an issue), she’s querulous, can’t make decisions, refuses to eat more than one cracker with cheese and a banana at lunch (”it’s too much food!”) and can’t even get that for herself. I am absolutely certain that she hates this feeling of not being able to control her own feet, her hands or her lunch, but she’s sure not making it easy on me, either.

I never realized how “easy” I had it when I was taking care of my invalid father. I didn’t have to worry about him falling (except when he was delirious and thought he could get out of bed), he ate whatever I set before him (even though he insisted on having tomato soup and a turkey sandwich for lunch every day). We all understood our rôles (he was the dying man, and I was the heroically dutiful daughter, with a supporting role played by my mom, the long-suffering spouse), and after a while we got into a rhythm.

Now, however, I never know from one day to the next (or even one hour to the next sometimes) what condition Plagioclase’s mother is in. She could be fine at breakfast, but by the time she comes for lunch she’s stupid (There is no way to put a positive spin on that word. She becomes cognitively inept.) and really difficult to deal with. Because of this, someone has to be here at mealtimes to make sure she eats without endangering herself with knives or hot coffee and takes her medicine.

The hardest part is Plagioclase is convinced that it’s something to do with the various medications she’s taking and her various conditions. I’m think that he feels that if he just finds the right combination of stuff, she’ll have good days all the time. I’m not quite so optimistic that there is a right combination.

In case you haven’t guessed — today is a bad day.

Which uses the least computer/bandwidth resources, reading your mail through the web (e.g. gmail or yahoo mail) or reading your mail locally?

I can see that for messages you want to read, it’s probably more efficient to read it locally. After all, you only have your mail program’s overhead to worry about. If you read online, you have the browser’s CPU usage as well as the cruft ads and frames associated with the website. This assumes that the message content itself takes the same amount of time to download to you.

However, for messages you don’t want to read (spam, interminable mailing list response threads that you keep holding off unsubscribing to because sometimes, sometimes they say something useful), you have to download the messages just to see the titles even though you already know that you don’t want that penis patch. Or that “Greeting card from classmate!” I suppose it would be better to use IMAP instead of POP so you’d get the best of both worlds, but I’ve never been satisfied with IMAP. Could be I was doing it wrong.

I “solved” this issue for myself by trying to do both. I use an online account for online stuff, and I keep my personal account very private (though I still get spam through dictionary attacks). But is this really more efficient?

I was looking around the Amazon.com grocery today, and I saw this “Label Information”

Ingredients
Water, Corn Syrup Solids, Distilled Vinegar, Salt, Parmesan Cheese (Adds a Trivial Amount of Fat) (Part- Skim Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes), Cultured Dextrose and Whey, Modified Food Starch, Dehydrated Food Starch, Dehydrated Garlic, Sugar, Dehydrated Onion, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Spices, Xanthan Gum, Artificial Color, Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate Added as Preservatives, Caramel Color, Anchovy Extract (Adds a Trivial Amount of Fat), Natural Flavors, Phosphoric Acid, Defatted Soy Flour.

Can you guess why I was so surprised I had to blog it? If you guessed it was because I was looking at Maxwell House Rich Original Coffee, you’d be right.

I thought there was just coffee in regular coffee, not Parmesan Cheese…

(Doing this from memory, as it’s not posted yet.)

Name a place that nearly everybody wants to go. It has a “V” in it. Change the “V” to “TH” and you’ll get somebody you’re unlikely to find there.

This one took about ten seconds. A hint, if you need one: “Think metaphorically.”

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