7 Quick Takes (Vol 205)

The calendar says that it is now March and that Spring will be here in less than two weeks. But I think that the calendar needs a wake up dope slap because it is only 30F outside and there is still the ever looming possibility of snow. But let’s not think about that.

You know the never ending Friday routine. When you are done covering yourself with a Sequestration proof layer of my blather you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of my rapidly increasing need for Easter candy, over to Conversion Diary.

Blather is the best medicine.

1.
Last night I had the best piece of beef in my entire life.

No seriously, it was.

Perfectly rare. Outer crust covered with crushed pepper corns. Fork tender. I am sure it came from a cow that had never done a days work in it’s life, just laid around and had massages and beer for breakfast.

I will tell you all about it next week, once I recover from my meat hangover.

2.
For some reason this particular post from 2009 has become an absolute target for SPAM comments. It is driving me NUTS! Most of the time Blogger’s SPAM filter catches the “Anonymous” comments and throws them right into the SPAM filter.

But not always. And I think that is because I occasionally have a legitimate commenter who posts under Anonymous.  So if I leave a comment from someone who is a legitimate commenter but has commented as Anonymous then Blogger thinks that it is OK to leave other comments by that same name.

SO, if you are commenting I would ask that you endeavor to make sure you comment with a name and not Anonymous. It just makes my life a bit easier.

3.
HHBL and I spent part of yesterday in Buffalo, NY for a big family thing. I will tell you about it next week whether you want me to or not. On the way home we stopped for gas and coffee and restroom.

As I entered the stall that I had chosen to use for it’s intended purpose I noticed that someone had thrown garbage on the floor, with irritated me. But then I realized that it was a box that had one time contained a pregnancy test. My imagination took over when I looked and realized that the box and the inner wrapping for the test were just dropped on the floor as if the person who was doing the test was in a hurry. And I thought, how sad that would be, if someone had to grab a pregnancy test somewhere and transport it to this gas station/quick mart (where I am sure that you could NOT buy a pregnancy test) so that they could test to see if they were pregnant.

I am hoping and praying that the news they received is what they wanted. Otherwise, finding out bad news in the bathroom stall of a quick mart is just heartbreaking.

4.

This is what I did for approximately 5 hours yesterday before driving to Buffalo. HHBL had a morning commitment and it didn’t make sense for him to go all the way into Cleveland and then come all the way back out to get me and THEN to drive to NY. So I just sat in the Starbucks in the Hanna building right by Playhouse Square. Lovely upstairs sitting area. GRANDE Blonde roast in hand.

A good way to spend a few hours reading and knitting.

I am not a fan, generally, of Starbucks coffee. But the Blonde roast isn’t all that bad.

And accompanied by the piece of Lemon Cake AND the donut…….Yum.

5.
Also yesterday I ate this…..

A McD’s cheeseburger. The perfect combination of fat and salt and preservatives.

This breaks my usual “One McD’s meal per quarter” rule as I dined at the Golden Arches on the way back from Florida a couple of weekends ago.

But sometimes rules are made to be broken.

6.
For the last few weeks I have been on an orgy of library book checking out. I don’t really need to be checking out books from the library as my To Be Read shelves are overly full.  But now I think I am back on track. I will be returning all, or most, of my library books today and getting back to reading what I have on hand.

Of course I am actually reading too many books at one time still but that is just the way that I roll.

Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas– for Book Club. A weighty tome to be sure. I was actually able to go and hear the author give a talk on how he came to write the book. He was REALLY funny.
Full House by MJ Farrell – One of the growing collection of Virago Press books. I am not sure how my little collection started but it is growing.
For the Thrill of It by Simon Baatz – about the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder. This one is at the bedside. Nothing like a little bit of murder and mayhem and sociopathology before sleep I always say.

7.
Today is International Women’s Day evidently. Just a reminder, when you hear any woman here in the United States complaining that they don’t have “equal rights”…….

You might want to tell them that they have absolutely no idea what it means to be someone who has “unequal rights”. Across the world there are so many women who are struggling every day to find food to eat, to take care of their children in homes that have no running water or electricity or sanitation. Women who walk miles and miles to fill up jugs of clean water, who are establishing businesses and making pennies a day, who are afraid to leave their refugee camps because the choice every day for them is to not have wood to make a fire with or to leave their camp to find wood and in the process to be assured of rape. Women who are forced into abortion because the sex of the baby is female or because they already have a child. Child brides. Sex slavery, which happens here in the US as well, don’t think it doesn’t.

Here is the United States we complain that we don’t have equal pay for equal work. We want our “fair share”. We want our “equal rights”.

We are blind idiots.

Getting down off of soap box now.