"An Ohio peanut butter distributor issued a voluntary recall Saturday for two brands of peanut butter after health officials in Minnesota on Friday said they had found salmonella bacteria in a tub of peanut butter that is distributed to schools and hospitals."
Read More...

I was going to use this as an excuse to sing the praises of homemade peanut butter when I saw the headline, but then I read the article and realized that no amount of peanut butter you make will protect you from the lowest-bidder food provider strategy used in schools and hospitals.  I'm not sure which is more sad, giving kids tainted food or giving sick people tainted food.

I'll talk about making your own peanut butter anyway, as the process is so simple it will make you wonder how the food industry can manage to get salmonella in there at all.  All you have to do is get over the fact that it doesn't have high fructose corn syrup, or a mountain of preservatives, or added oils.  Real peanut butter has one ingredient - peanuts.  Real peanut butter takes about 10 minutes to make.  Real peanut butter requires a single appliance.

So here's what you do to make peanut butter:
1. Buy a big bucket of plain peanuts.  Go to Sams or Costco or wherever.  Be careful!  There are at least two varieties of plain peanuts - one has peanuts and salt, the other has extras like corn syrup.  Sadly, you do have to check the ingredients on plain peanuts.
2. Go home and put a bunch of peanuts in the food processor, turn it on.
3. Wait a while.  The food processor will sound angry, but do not be alarmed, it will get quieter.  Let it go for 5 minutes, check the consistency.  The smoother you want it, the longer you leave it in there.
4. Scrape into container with lid, place in fridge right away.
Note: Unlike store bought real peanut butter, this won't separate as long as you get it in the fridge quickly.

I don't know how we went down the road of mass producing something that is so easy to make on a small scale, or how it ended up that real peanut butter sitting along side the mass produced peanut butter on the grocery shelf costs so much more..  And with a process that simple, how do you make people sick with the finished product?  I guess if you try hard enough...maybe rub some uncooked chicken in there or something?  Yummy chicken flavored peanut butter!

(Click on it if you can't read it)

Consider the following two packages I am tracking. Both ordered on Nov. 28. Both from Amazon.  The USPS package is very small, maybe 1-2 pounds.  The other package is quite a bit larger (weight not given to protect the package's identity from prying Annie eyes).

USPS
Provided by Amazon:
December 02, 2008 11:30:00 AM HAZELWOOD MO Arrival Scan
November 29, 2008 04:28:00 AM HAZELWOOD MO Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit
Provided by USPS:
Status: Processed - Your item was processed and left our HAZELWOOD, MO 63042 facility on December 2, 2008.

UPS:

EARTH CITY, MO,  US	12/03/2008	5:01 A.M.	OUT FOR DELIVERY
	12/03/2008	4:15 A.M.	DESTINATION SCAN
	12/03/2008	3:19 A.M.	ARRIVAL SCAN
INDIANAPOLIS, IN,  US	12/02/2008	11:54 P.M.	DEPARTURE SCAN
	12/02/2008	11:14 P.M.	ARRIVAL SCAN
	12/02/2008	10:46 P.M.	DEPARTURE SCAN
	12/02/2008	8:08 P.M.	ARRIVAL SCAN
	12/02/2008	7:44 P.M.	DEPARTURE SCAN
	12/02/2008	6:10 P.M.	ORIGIN SCAN
US	12/02/2008	3:36 P.M.	BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

What the heck is USPS telling me?  on Nov. 29 it appears the package is in Hazelwood, MO.  Eleven miles from it's destination.  Then, apparently, nothing happened for a couple days.  Then suddenly....wow, it's in Hazelwood, MO.  But I thought it was already there...?  Who knows?  Since Amazon wasn't clear I went to look at usps.gov only to find that one tiny tidbit of info.  I guess it's coming today?  But maybe I should've gotten it yesterday?

UPS, perhaps, is a bit excessive by comparison, but at least I know exactly when they picked up the package, where it bounced around, and the most recent place it's been spotted.  And I know that I'll get it today because it's "out for delivery."  So I know, since it's being delivered to work, to go look for it.  And if I can't find it, to bug the people who might have recieved it with all the other crap we get on any given day.

I'm sure I'll get both (eventually) but I find it interesting that you generally pay more to have USPS ship a package (in my experience), especially if you pay for tracking, but apparently you don't much benefit for it, at least not in terms of tracking info.  Maybe they should just stick with letters.

The dogs have a blog now: http://KobiAndMilo.blogspot.com/

I figure it will amuse some people, and I hope it will be beneficial to other people who stumble across it looking for information on ACL surgery or recapturing escaped dogs or whatever. I'm going to try to update it reasonably often without filling it up with meaningless crap like, "Tuesday - Kobi slept all afternoon again. Milo is in his crate."

I figured I'd try something other livejournal for them, and I think I like the blogger interface better.

(Note - I changed the URL so for the few people who got a preview look, this is a bit different. I also added more pictures to the first couple of posts.)

Enjoy. :)

Okay, I know everyone poops, and when the monster caterpillars took over our veggie garden they pooped all over, but I'd never really considered a spider. Yesterday, when I got home from work, I rolled the trashcan up to the side of the house. And while there under the roof overhang I felt a drop hit my forehead. It was sunny and cloudless so I was a little confused. I wiped the drop onto the back of my hand and was perturbed to see that it was milky white and I thought a bird crapped on me. But I looked up at the overhang, and there was no bird. I'd heard no flapping of wings. There was, however, a ginormous spider in a massive house-spanning web. Huge bloated brown monstrosity. Sometimes they're all legs, but this guy (gal, I guess) had a massive body, the legs were just little insignificant twigs.

I think that spider pooped on me.

So the corn industry has commercials and even a damn website heralding the greatness of "all natural" high fructose corn syrup. It's atrocious, it reminds me if the Carbon dioxide is life! pro-pollution (er, anti-global warming alarmism) commercials that were around a couple of years ago. "We are big business, and with our gobs of cash we promise to help you help us make more gobs of cash." Anyway...

Just for fun, lets compare what goes into production of regular sugar vs. corn syrup.

Sugar Production entails:
*Crush sugar cane, extract and filter juice.
*Treat with lime to neutralize and remove impurities.
*Boil for a bit
*Remove sediment from the bottom, skim off the gunk on top
*Cool/evaporate and remove syrup to get crystals.
*Use as is (raw), or make white refined sugar we all have in our kitchen with additional filtering of impurities using something like charcoal.

HFCS production entails:
*Steep corn for a couple days, it ferments a bit.
*Separate Germ from Endosperm
*Grind the above seperately.
*Remove starch from each by washing.
*Separate starch from gluten and dry it.
*Cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce oligosaccharides (shorter chains of sugars)
*Glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose.
*Xylose isomerase (aka glucose isomerase) converts glucose to a mixture of about 42% fructose and 50–52% glucose with some other sugars mixed in.

Which could you do completely on your own, without, say, a chemist? Which sounds more "natural" to you?

Edit: I completely forgot honey! Here's how you make honey (after the bees are done workiing): remove honey from honeycomb, strain (gets out the chunks), filter (optional - high-pressure with fine filter - gets out the pollen but also some nutrients), done. How's that for natural?

...or just doesn't have the balls to say it.

"McCain selects an inexperienced woman as VP in order to sway some hard-headed Hillary-or-Die pseudo-democrats and put a young pretty face on his campaign."

(Update: Someone eventually mentioned some of this, I think. Under the editorial headline of, "Has John McCain lost his mind?" or some such thing. I guess it's not really the type of thing you throw into your average "unbiased" news story.)

Facts about Sarah Palin:
She was a sports team mom!
She runs marathons!
Her Husband is a snowmachine race champion!
She was Ms Alaska!
She was on the cover of Vogue!
She served two terms as a city council woman!
Two terms as mayor!
Governor for almost two years
Chair of not one, not two, but three committees/commissions!
President of the Alaska Conference of Mayors!

I'm literally bowled over by her experience...

(Note that all of that except the Vogue and Ms Alaska parts are from the Alaska State Govt. site, I wasn't really mining for silly things to put on the list.)

I wish it said *WARNING* or *DANGER* or *CAUTION*. But at least they let me know before I made the mistake of wildly opening the cabinet only to have my hopes and dreams crushed by the lack of cups therein.



Other signs I'd like to post for a few select people in my company to see:
-You need to flush the urinal every time, jackass
-And wash your hands, you filthy pig
-For God's sake, put some clothes on when you come to work
-Write software that doesn't suck, you know, just for a change of pace

No if you'll excuse me I'm going to go translate that sign into French, German, and Spanish just in case we have some foreign visitors who might need cups...

------------------------
From: Phil
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 7:35 AM
To: Technical Staff
Subject: Friday

The Fun Committee thought it would be fun if Friday was “Wear a Blue Shirt Day”. Feel free to participate.
------------------------

I received that this morning, and boy was I excited. In case you're wondering where you might have heard that before...
Bill Lumbergh: 'Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.'

Sadly, the only difference is that Hawaiian Shirt Day would actually be more fun.

Please, everyone in foreign countries, please understand that he doesn't speak for all of us. Just, you know, give us a few more months and we'll hopefully start climbing out of this 8-year-deep hole...

Carson street is the heart of Pittsburgh's South Side. It's a fairly long strip of bars, clubs, restaurants, eclectic shops, tattoo parlors, comic book shops and chiropractors (one of these things doesn't belong....). Some are pretty fancy, some are pretty crazy hippie, and there are people of all kinds to see.

-A guy was trying to parallel park his VW Bug completely wrong and really pissing off traffic in both directions. A motorcycle cop stopped oncoming traffic to give the little car more room to maneuver and when he finally got into the (rather large) parking space, the cop drove by and yelled, "If you can't park that little thing maybe you should walk!" The people eating outside at the cafe I was at got a kick out of it. When the guy got out of the car he walked quickly, head down, to his destination.

-An older man on an older motorcycle of the Harley-Davidson variety. He had some kind of weird fur cover over the back of it, behind the seat (maybe there's storage back there? Maybe it was on the seat, like a seat cover?). There were cutout rectangles on the furry thing on both sides of the back. Framed inside these cutouts where "Ron Paul for President" signs. The best part, though, was the LOUD BLASTING POLKA MUSIC blaring from his radio.

-Damn...there was something else I saw that was fun and would've completed this post, but now I can't recall what it was. I mean, something besides the weird punk-goth kids all wearing Zipcar.com company polo shirts and the lady who was maybe/probably a prostitute. Well, if I think of it I'll edit the post...

This is kinda gross. Enjoy!

Guy: Hello, Vet Emergency Place, can I help you?
Me: Hi, I have a Shiba Inu. He, um, he ate a tampon. He threw it up a little while ago, but before we could take care of it he...he ate it again. Should we make him throw up again or just wait and see what happens?
Guy: He ate what?
Me: A tampon.
Guy: Oh, hold on just a sec...
~music~
Girl: Hi...so we ate a tampon, huh? A couple times?
Me: Yeah. Should I make him vomit again?
Girl: Well, we don't want that in there. Best to make him vomit. Do you have hydrogen peroxide....?
...etc...

Fortunately, we have peroxide just for this reason. And a turkey baster also just for this reason (if you ever need to force liquid down a dogs throat, a turkey baster is the tool of choice). We've only had to administer peroxide once before, but Kobi got antsy as soon as we opened the bottle. So Annie got to hold him and I got to put him in a headlock and we got to force our dog to vomit. Poor guy was so confused. He thought he was going to get his after-dinner treat, and suddenly we've taken him outside and forced awfulness down his throat and then waited patiently while he barfed up the full contents of his stomach on the lawn. Fortunately, everything came out okay and he was too sick to try and re-eat anything. So he napped all evening on the couch, and I got to clean up and hose down the lawn.

We just got back from Texas on Tuesday. But first - everyone should read a book called The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It's informative, political, philosophical, and good for you all at the same time. It will make you think about what you're eating, force you to consider where your food is coming from, and make you quit being so smug about buying organic. He's not preachy in the book, but the points he's driving at are pretty obvious. If my recommendation isn't good enough, it also has 4.5 stars over 400+ reviews on Amazon.

Back to Texas - we went down for Annie's friend Laura's wedding. She's known Laura since they were 1 or 2 years old when they were neighbors. Laura's family later moved to Kansas City, and then later still to San Antonio. They hadn't seen each other for about 15 years so it was fun for them to get reacquainted. We took plenty of pictures while we were down there. Feel free to browse through them. :)

( More On Texas... )

For those I haven't talked to lately, that's the third wedding we went to out of four, all in four weeks. Two in St. Louis, one in Texas, and another in Lexington, KY that my sister and I will be driving to this weekend. On top of that, I've also been to Pittsburgh for a week and to Denver for three days for work in the middle of all this. I'm ready for wedding season to be done.

When I travel I generally stay at a Holiday Inn Express or a Hampton Inn. They're not great, they're generic business traveler hotels and they have free breakfast. So I'm in Pittsburgh, and the Hampton Inn I stayed at last time I was here isn't available. So I grab the Holiday Inn Express. Let me run down my experience across slightly more than one day:

1. Arrive. Stand at front desk talking to coworker for 5 minutes. No service. Fill out the "I'm parking here, this is what kind of car I have" form. Wait. Cough. Make noise. Get bored. Oh, there's the girl. She was too busy talking to the other girl around the corner, didn't know we were there.

2. Get up to room. key doesn't work. Back to front desk for new key.

3. Get up to room. It's a smoking room. Smells like awful. Back to front desk. "Sorry sir, we only have smoking rooms available." Back to room. Check on other hotels in the area. None nearby have rooms available.

4. Manage to sleep okay. Go work. Come back. Go eat. Come back. Watching TV and I hear drip............ drip.......... drip drip....... drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip... Must be the shower. Oh no. That's coming from the ceiling of the bathroom. The floor is soaked.

5. Call the front desk (11:00 PM). "Sorry, we don't have any maintenance available." Inform them that it's really dripping a lot. Repeat: the floor is soaked. "We'll send someone up in the morning." Become angry, ask the fellow for verification that my bathroom is going to be flooded all night. "You can ask a manager in the morning about compensation." Slam phone down in anger.

6. The night rent-a-cop security guy brings me a towel up. I don't need a towel, I need the fucking leak fixed. But he seems genuinely concerned, "Oh jeez, that's really coming in. I'll go check upstairs." I hear him radio the front desk. They repeat to him that it'll just have to wait til morning.

7. Security guy comes back with a bucket and informs me that the upstairs toilet is broken. I guess demolished? Like, ripped out of the floor or something? 'Cause damn, that's a lot of water. He said the people in that room were sleeping, had no idea.

So the guy who's not even a real employee is the one who helped me the most by giving me a bucket and apologizing like mad. The douchebag at the front desk, if he said "sorry" at all, just sounded pissed that I was bothering him. And I can't even go sit on the damn toilet because I'll have the upstairs room's toilet water dripping on me.

What hotel doesn't have 24-hour maintenance? I mean, people are AT THE HOTEL AT NIGHT. During the day, who cares, people are out and about. But everyone is HERE at NIGHT. Should be sleeping, not throwing towels down to try to make the flooded bathroom usable. Fucking unbelievable...

So never every stay at the Holiday Inn Express on Tenth street in Pittsburgh. Just in case you were planning a trip, stay anywhere else but there.

I figured I'd had this goatee long enough and that it was time for a change. I was so happy with the results I put on my best shirt and ran down to Sears and had them take some shots. I think all you ladies out there will be very impressed at the outcome. Click my beautiful mug for more pics...

Annie made Pretzel Snakes, some guy at work made corned beef and brought it in, and I've got my green tie on. How much more festive could we be...? None, none more festive.

Annie has started a new blog chronicling her adventures in cooking. She's been taking a lot of pics of the food she's been making lately so if you like tasty (yet still healthy!) food hop on over and have a look. :)

http://homedining.blogspot.com/

I'm told that the color in STL was more vibrant than in Boston and that our sky was clearer than in Kansas City. However, I only had my little digicam and a tripod that I propped up on the roof, so even the better pics are a little fuzzy. If I could've put the tripod on the driveway it would've been more stable, but a streetlight would've been in the way. It was far too cold to try and find an ideal spot.

Anyway, if you missed it, I have a couple of shots you can look at and pretend you saw it. :)

When I travel, there are a lot of times when what I really want to do is go to a coffee shop and drink a huge cup o' coffee, and either work or just bum around killing time on the interwebs. And there are plenty of times the only coffee shop that might offer such services is Starbucks. But for years they've been using T-Mobile crap hotspots and I won't pay $6/hour to use that. I guess their T-Mobile contract ran out, and their bouncing over to AT&T and providing (gasp) free WiFi access.

Apparently if you already have AT&T broadband you're set or you can "check in" with a Starbucks card, which is apparently like a rechargeable phone card, only for coffee. While I have no great love of AT&T, they are my DSL provider at home, and while I have no great love of carrying around yet another card in my wallet, I would make that sacrifice just to be able to get out of the hotel room and work somewhere with an atmosphere. (For those of you who don't have the distinct ... er ... pleasure of traveling for business, the average Business Class hotel has about as much atmosphere as the inside of a cardboard box. Conducive to boredom and, if you're lucky, sleeping, but not for much else.)

Ideally, of course, I just wouldn't be traveling much, but if I have to be gone I try and find any way to make the best of things.

"FBI wants palm prints, eye scans, tattoo mapping"

Initially it sounds like maybe it's just for criminals, and maybe that would be okay, but then you get down to quotes like this:

"The FBI plans a so-called 'rap-back' service in which an employer could ask the FBI to keep the prints for an employee on file and let the employer know if the person ever has a brush with the law."

That's a huge step towards Big Brother watching everything you do. I hope the ACLU and others can beat it down with the old Right To Privacy hammer.