kochleffel

The sizes vary, but typically 30 to 40 pounds. The difficulty for me is keeping hold of them by the bottom rollers.

Really important news. I'm glad to know that the U.S. Space Force is keeping track of this. While much of the United States braces for an arctic blast set to bring widespread severe weather this holiday weekend, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) wants to reassure citizens that Santa’s voyage will not be impacted by the storm. “He’s ready to make his rounds,” Master Sgt. Ben Wiseman said in a phone interview from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. “They’re prepared. They’re protected. They’re used to this weather.”

Thanks. It appears that my booking will allow Canaletto, but it includes only two specialty dinners in 14 nights. In contrast, my booking on aNother Cruise Line to Bermuda will have four specialty dinners in five nights: two as part of a promotion, and two for platinum status. (I have no status on HAL.)

It snowed most of the afternoon, although the accumulation was only an inch. By the time I was leaving work, it had changed to rain, and when I went to the synagogue for the lighting of the BGM at 6:00, it was still raining. We're planning to hold multi-access services (in-person and Zoom) as usual unless something changes. I'm still unhappy with the news media, which seem to be positively eager for the weather to be a disaster, and it may well be in much of the country. We're not expecting much except that it will be cold tomorrow night and Saturday morning. I remembered as I was driving home that the remote control for the garage door needed a new battery. I had bought one but wasn't sure where it was; found it in my coat pocket. I got the cookies baked, but I don't think they came out quite right. Our rabbi keeps mentioning that it's also Shabbat Festivus, and I keep reminding him that there is to be no airing of grievances. There will be feats of strength, not because of Festivus, but because there are readings from three Torah scrolls this week and after each one, the scroll is raised overhead, partly open so that everyone can see the part that was read. I hope not to be called for that, because while I can lift the scrolls readily enough, arthritis in my hands makes it hard to keep hold.

I'm sure that many Dailyites have visited Pompeii during Mediterranean cruises. In recent years, the vast archaeological park of Pompeii, a city buried alive by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has turned to high-tech options to maintain its excavated ruins. A surveillance drone makes a monthly flight over the site’s roughly 10,000 exhumed rooms. Artificial intelligence programs analyze aerial images for new cracks, fallen stones and other signs of erosion. But to prevent the third of the park that remains hidden under pumice and meters of earth from becoming overgrown with thorn bushes, wild hedges and trees, Pompeii has found a more appropriately ancient, and inexpensive, solution in hungry sheep. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/world/europe/pompeii-sheep-mount-vesuvius.html

If I get put into the brig, will someone bring me a cake with a file in it?

I don't understand. I thought that Canaletto was included in HIA. Although my booking shows only two included specialty dinners, and maybe Canaletto is in third place for popularity?

If I don't post tomorrow, it might be because I was sanctioned by CC, for saying on another board almost, but not quite, what I really think. I seem to have lost the ability to tolerate entitlement and willful stupidity.

Inside your cabin, not on the door. Why is decorating doors so blinking important? I can understand decorating the inside of your cabin, but is it really important to declare your taste and creativity to people merely passing in the corridor?

Squash again? I have a honeynut squash and might cook it, but not with that recipe. I think that dinner will be Swiss chard with tofu and toasted sesame oil, plus a sweet potato. An omelet is also possible but not with ham and bacon. I plan to bake cookies today but not for an exchange. Hakodate was on the itinerary for a Celebrity TPAC last year that was cancelled, and I went to Greece instead.

I have to persuade the Junior Cat that she is not, in fact, a leopard. The Big Cat Public Safety Act is now law, and it prohibits unlicensed keeping of them (all species and hybrids of lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, and cougar). She is a very, very small cat, but if she continues to insist that she's a leopard, we could be in trouble.

I brought the battery jump-starter for the car in, partly because it needs to be charged two or three times a year even if not used and I'll be on a car trip next week, but also because it can charge phones and other devices. We are not expecting severe weather here this week, but almost anything can happen almost anytime. I've also started stocking shelf-stable food in case of being snowed in. Last winter there were days when the roads were passable but I couldn't get my car out.

This is agonizing. I also post on FlyerTalk, where there is an Old-Timer's Quiz that has been running for many years and more than 27,000 posts. There is an unanswered question for which I'm pretty sure that I have an answer, but I can't use it, because I figured it out from a timetable, not from my own memory, which doesn't run to the sort of information that most of the questions require. Once in a while I'm able to get one from an arcane hint that has nothing actually to do with aviation, or through successive approximations, but that wasn't the case with this one.

After a brief excursion along a highway, a rogue 20-year-old llama has been returned home in Northern Virginia. Kolby, a black female llama, was spotted galloping down Fairfax County Parkway, near Popes Head Road, on Sunday night. She was subsequently caught by the county’s Animal Protection Police. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/12/21/llama-fairfax-county-parkway/

The news media are messing with my birthday celebration plans, through all their yammering about "bomb cyclone," "storm of the century," and "widespread blizzards" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/12/20/blizzard-bomb-cyclone-cold-storm/) It will be bad over a large part of the country, and the storm will eventually reach here, but the forecast for Friday is just an inch of snow, although it will be cold Friday night and Saturday morning. I don't think that the synagogue will pivot to Zoom-only, especially after doing that last week when it turned out not to be necessary, but the dire forecast and the actual low temperature will probably keep most people home. Several of my Protestant clergy friends hold Blue Christmas events at their churches. We don't have anything parallel, but I'm prone to seasonal depression and so, even with no specific reason to grieve, I can sympathize. I'm not sure whether Humbug Day refers to Ebenezer Scrooge--I once wrote an adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" for puppet theater--or to the old-fashioned boiled sweet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humbug_(sweet) I would enjoy the meal suggestion in a restaurant or, preferably, on a BHB, but could never make it at home because of the combination of meat and dairy ingredients. I'm not strict away from home, but at home I use separate pans for meat and dairy, so a combination is impossible to make.

That's what I was figuring.

Do you remember when I donated blood about a month ago? This evening I received an email message from the blood bank, telling me where my blood had been sent (Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse). They've never done that before. I suspect that it was related to their call, which I missed, asking me to schedule my next donation, even though it will be another month before I'm eligible. And I did schedule it, a few days before I leave for Bermuda, although Bermuda isn't a country that requires deferral.

But only as a visitor, not a prisoner?

Actually, if that's the best way to get a very ill patient to an appropriate hospital. In 2020, before the shutdown, was on a ship that diverted toward Grand Turk to rendezvous with a USCG helicopter dispatched from a base in the Bahamas. Grand Turk has only a tiny hospital and the one on Providenciales isn't much bigger; the goal was to get the patient to a place from which a fixed-wing air evacuation was possible. The nearest hospital that could have treated the patient was in Nassau, but the patient or the patient's family elected to be airlifted to Miami, and since they, or their travel insurance, were paying for that part of it, that's what was done. Coast guards and navies of other countries also airlift patients, if they are the nearest that can help, but for the Caribbean islands it's usually the USCG even if the patient will be taken to another country.

I don't have to look far for evergreens (from yesterday's Daily): they're right outside, constantly being eaten by deer. I have in mind to replace the smaller ones with Ilex glabra, inkberry -- there are compact varieties that can be grown in place of boxwood, which is nothing but trouble in the growing conditions here. Most Ilex species are what we call holly, but there is a non-prickly native variety, the yaupon. It's not totally suitable for my property, because most strains of it grow to enormous size. Neither of the meal suggestions will work for me. Unless I have some inspiration in the next hour, dinner will be the chicken cooked with shallots and tomatoes left from yesterday. I don't understand why anyone would make a pumpkin cocktail. I haven't been to Sydney. Does anyone remember the Sacagawea dollar? It replaced the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, but didn't catch on much better; Wikipedia says "introduced in 2000, although not minted for general circulation between 2002 to 2008 and again from 2012 onward because of its general unpopularity with the public and low business demand for the coin." There has been very little interest in dollar coins ever since the silver dollar was withdrawn, and now they're inconvenient in retail because cash trays have no section for them. They might not have been produced at all if Congress had not enacted a law requiring it. In 2007 Congress added a requirement that the reverse of the coin depict other Native Americans prominent in history.

A friend who had an elaborate English-style garden, with more than 100 varieties of roses and many other special plantings (think Sissinghurst in extreme miniature) replaced almost everything with conifers when arthritis made it too difficult to maintain, keeping only her three dozen favorite rose varieties.

The Junior Cat is starting to remind me of posts often seen on CC: "The service is terrible, the food isn't good, either, and the portions are so small!"

Well, after all the angst, the Hanukkah dinner and concert were a huge success. The dire predictions that the main course would be inedible (that came from one of the cooks) and that the head cook, after tasting it, would throw it out (from the rabbi's wife), were proved wrong; we did not run out of food; and people who sat right down at tables instead of going out to the front lawn to light the big outdoor hanukkiah (menorah) did not eat all the salad and rolls before those who did go out came to their tables (that was my prediction, but I guess the cohort that used to do that has died out). Here's the big giant menorah from the front lawn. A factor in people's satisfaction was probably that it was the first sit-down dinner in the synagogue since 2019. We had the same reaction at our annual meeting in June, but that was a picnic, with seating in a tent. The meal suggestion would be OK with me, and I will be cooking chicken, because I bought a package of thawed but uncooked kosher chicken (we had 8 packages that weren't used, having ordered by the case), but probably not with that recipe since I don't have the other ingredients. I would pass on the cocktail even though banana and rum, or banana and orange, are good together. I haven't been to Brazil.

I was going to say that cookies should definitely be baked, but yesterday I saw an article about recipes for unbaked cookies. All of them seemed to involve peanut butter or almond butter, iow, they were all rather similar. One of my favorite types of cookie, bourbon balls or rum balls, is unbaked, but made with crumbs of vanilla wafers or graham crackers, which have already been baked. Twins run in my family but not in my direct line. Former Sen. Jeff Flake said once that everyone in his hometown (Snowflake, Ariz.) was a Flake--they were all related--but he was in college before he learned that it sounded odd to say that. Air-fryer meatballs don't sound quite right to me. I'd prefer the sirloin from Roy's alternative menu. Dinner tonight will actually be chicken baked in a sauce, potato latkes with applesauce, roasted carrots, and green salad, with sufganiot (Israeli-style jelly doughnuts, the filling inserted through the top so that a dot of color shows) after the concert. My only role in the cooking was to transfer the dinner rolls from the freezer to pans in the refrigerator so that they can be baked this morning. Fox Run Vineyards is in my region, but I've never visited there. The postal address is Penn Yan, which is the home of Birkett Mills, the largest packer of buckwheat in the U.S., in business since 1797. Buckwheat is a traditional New York crop, introduced by Dutch settlers.

I was once a guest in Cagney's of a Platinum passenger who took the unopened bottle with him at disembarkation, to give to a brother whom he was about to visit. My own first cruise as Platinum is in six weeks, and since I will have a beverage package, I might bring it home. Question: does it count against the U.S. customs exemption?