Category: food

Frida’s Wandering Thoughts

I was shopping at Trader Joe’s yesterday. As I considered blueberries and wondered how much I was willing to pay for my fruit, a loaf of bread fell to the floor to my left, about six feet away.

Nobody was anywhere near it. I walked over, reshelved it, and returned to the blueberries where I cursed high prices and selected my berries. As I did, a tub of yogurt jumped from the shelf to the floor on my right, about six feet away.

WTH? Nobody was there. I walked over, reshelved it, and headed down another aisle. As I did, a box of pasta leaped off a shelf and landed on the floor about six feet ahead of me.

WTAF???

This time, as I went to pick it up, a TJ employee overtook me. “I’ll take care of that, sir,” she said.

“Okay, thanks.” I then explained, “This is the third thing that fell or jumped from the shelf to the floor in front of me today. Some of it does seem like it jumped and didn’t fall. It’s like I’m following the ghost of a klutzy Trader Joe’s shopper.”

She chuckled. “Well, you never know what you’ll find at Trader Joe’s.”

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Figs!

My spouse is a fignatic, a figinista, a fan of high magnitude of figs. She loves figs. Through her, I’ve come to enjoy them. Knowing this, a friend has been supplying us with figs. I snapped this photo Wenzda; we have three bowls of figs like this. Or had, as we’ve eaten a few.

This is the second go round from this fig supplier. These are huge beauties. So delicious, so nutritious, and a good source for calcium, potassium, vitamins C, A, K, and B6. We just eat them rare, although I’m cautious, as they’re high in oxalates, and can cause kidney stones. I already have that issue.

Figs been hard to come by at the stores and have become expensive. The last pint we purchased was $11 and had five small figs. None were in good shape, so my friend’s largesse is happily accepted.

Good to have friends like this.

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Twosda’s Theme Music

Cool air regales us today, Twosda, July 15, 2025, in Ashlandia. Tiny wet old smoke offset’s the mountain air’s freshes. We’ll live. 68 F now, 97 F is forecasted. We saw 99.3 at our house yesterday but didn’t need the A/C. A clear blue sky and focused sun says, yeah, this might be a hot one.

On local news, the talk is about affordable housing. Affordable housing has been discussed since I moved here twenty years ago, along with growth. Each time ‘affordable housing’ is approved and built, investors snatch it up to flip or rent out. So it’s all been 20 years of talk and churn with no substantial changes.

Our local economy isn’t doing well. Ashland depends on tourism and Southern Oregon University (SOU) for the most part, along with some spotty light industry, mostly related to outdoor tourism, and of course, healthcare. Wineries and breweries give us two more legs. Beyond that, we have a service based economy, as most residents are older and retired. Tourism has been damaged by heat, wildfires, and smoke. Tourism’s centerpiece is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, assisted by a series of outdoor concerts called the Britt Festival. Both were heavily cratered by smoke, heat, and wildfires. The pandemic then knocked tourism back again just when recovery began. Now we hold our breath, cross our fingers, and wait to feel what Trump’s attacks on people, trade, common sense and other nations does to tourism.

Meanwhile, healthcare’s rising costs have driven costcutting, layoffs, and firings to that local industry. The Greedy Ol’ Trump Party’s monstrous bill is expected to implode rural healthcare activities, and we’re part of that scene.

Finally, SOU has announced that enrollment has declined again. Tuition has been raised but they can’t keep raising it, so they’ve cut staff and programs. Desperate for money, they’re planning to shift some unused parts of their their campus into that fast-growing industry, assisted living. But again, the greed propelled GOTP absurdly named ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is expected to body slam education at all levels. Trump has cut Pell Grants and other programs, and that will leave a mark.

Underlying all of it: Trump’s charge to deny climate change and do nothing except punish those who do try to talk about it and address its impacts and causes. But climate change will affect the beer and wine industry, tourism, and wildfires. Did I mention that insurance companies withdrew from providing coverage in the area?

BTW, talk is about more than just this. We’re also talking a lot about deer, as they’ve become aggressive and attack dogs and people walking dogs.

Today’s song is “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie. The Neurons slotted the 1974 song into the morning mental music stream for reasons they closehold and don’t disclose.

In a final comment on the morning, the local Internet, and by local, I mean ‘at my house’, is very sluggish. Anything happening to it out there in the world? Probably, but when will we learn?

Have the best day you can. I hope it’s excellent. Cheers

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Sunda’s Wandering Thoughts

I baked for the Independence Day festivities. I’m not usually the house baker but my wife thought I should bake as a blow against the patriarchy. So bake I did.

My baking was the modern kind: a brownie mix, egg, oil, water. Everything except the water was purchased at a store. The water came from my faucet, part of our city’s water and sewage systems.

I made circular brownies with M&Ms in a silicon baking pan created for that job. We have a gas oven with a timer and all that. I added the ingredients into a bowl per directions, preheated the oven to the temperature they told me to use, and doled the rich concoction into the waiting little cups built into the silicon ‘pan’. Then, see the timer for the time the instructions recommended, wait, watch, and test to see if they’re done, using the honored toothpick test.

The process allowed a lot of free time thinking. And that becomes my point. Baking has been around about 10,000 years. The earliest evidence of baking comes from Egypt, and not the United States. While it may have started around the Meditarranean Sea, it grew. Many peoples, cultures, and societies contributed to its growth and the lessons learned in what works. Then they passed it on. People took it up, tweaeked and refined it, documented it, and passed it on. People from many religions and ethnicities had a hand in it. Men and women, along with people of less certain genders baked, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of nationality or religion, until we reached this point that baking is a well-refined and understood process, simplified enough that even a neophyte like me can gather stuff and bake.

Here is my real point, something the Trump Regime and its half-assed backward, racist, sexist supporters want to dismiss. We live in a world of developments built on the shoulders of others. We’ve stacked advances and helped consolidate, perpetuate, and spread the gains. Name an industry and explore it, and amazingly, you’ll probably discover that it wasn’t all done by white Christian American men. Now the Trumpettes want to pretend that no one except white Americans did anything worthwhile, especially in the United States to deliver the success we’ve achieved as a nation, trying to bestow as much credit as possible on men and Christianity, even if they need to lie to make their case, which they do.

America First! Hell, the United States wouldn’t exist without immigration — and shall we talk to the peoples who lived in North America before the waves of explorers, settlers, and armies ‘discovered’ the land mass? America First! Our form of democratic government is derived from other nations, as is our mercantile system, which also depends on other nations for success.

Trump’s willful, deliberate ignorance won’t stand, although it will do serious damage. Progress comes from unforeseen developments as much as planned advances. We don’t know who will make a critical, game-changing insight. Trump is trying to pretend otherwise. He can successfully fake it for a while, but eventually, his willful stupidity will bite us all in the ass.

As always, time will tell when and how. Meanwhile, we grit our teeth and resist his ignorance as best as we can.

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Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

If you have a brain, and some thinking skills, the full Trumpasy is all revealed. Just check out the Trump Regime’s actions. Look at the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’. Read again Project 2025.

  1. Redistribute wealth to the wealthy. They need it to ‘build the economy’. This is called trickle down economics. It has been decisively proven not to work.
  2. Start shredding the welfare net. Cut Medicaid. Force people to work more.
  3. Cut all assistance contributed by the Federal government to the states and local communities. Downtrodden existences lead to downtrodden morale. A sick people is a desperate people, and are more easily manipulated.
  4. De-construct the education system. An uneducatd population is more guillible. Indoctrinate young people into right wing values via vouchers and private schools.
  5. Manufacture and reinforce negative stereotypes of other citizens, people who ‘are different’, i.e., people who are not heterosexual and white. This is useful for blame games and distraction, and helps neuter political will.
  6. Weaponize ICE into a paramilitary force. While laws limit what the US military is authorized to do to citizens, it’s a more wide-open field with ICE. Under the guise of rounding up ‘illegal immigrants’, the Trump Regime are also undermining due process and the concepts of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. People are being disappeared as the right-wing social media machine provides cover by declaring that the Constitution isn’t meant to be applied to ‘non-citizens’.
  7. Establish concentration camps. The first one has been built in Florida, of course. Don’t be surprised if Texas eagerly builds one in the race to be patriotic by refusing others equality, rights, and freedom. Disappearing people and creating concentration camps stoke fears and can be used to threaten political opposition.
  8. Build a right-wing Supreme Court bias that’s willing to overlook history and precedence, one which will used flawed interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to empower the Executive Branch and wipe out the checks and balance system provided by three equal branches.
  9. Weaponize trade. Try to force manufacturing back to the United States, even though the raw materials are obtained elsewhere, and even though the capital investments needed for new factories are astronomical. This provides a false hope of new jobs; there will be new jobs but they won’t pay wages needed to live in this ever expensive land, forcing people to work more, no matter their health or situation. This will also increase people’s desperation to work and make money to pay for basic goods and services such as food and housing, as prices see tariff-based inflation bound upward.
  10. But — also cut limitations on child labor laws. Encourage poor poeple to have more children to provide a larger and cheaper work force.
  11. Cut or waive environmental laws and regulations to reduce the cost of building new manufacturing facilities.
  12. Nurture confusion among facts and distrust of the news media. Confusion helps the Regime maintain control by undermining grass root organizations’ ability to effectively organize and protest. It also allows the Regime to turn citizen against citizen in a cold war that favors the Trump Regime’s heavy hand.
  13. Distract, distract, distract. In this endeavor, natural disasters are your friend; they pull focus from the political arena. Reduce the Federal government’s effectiveness in predicting disasters and helping states and communities. Again, chaos, confusion, and low morale are useful for controlling and manipulating the population. As a bonus, when a natural disaster levels a region, it opens up land and opportunity to rebuild. People with next to nothing can be more easily induced to take less pay for bad jobs.
  14. Attack other nations; encourage aggression among other nations. Make the world a scarier place.

Yes, this is cynical. It’s not my thinking, but my interpretation of what the Trump Regime and the Republican-filled Greedy Ol’ Trump Party, also known as the GOTP, is doing. Show me I’m wrong. Point to Trump’s actions and demonstrate otherwise. Parse that OBBB for clues that this is not what the Trump Regime pursues.

Time will tell. It’s already told us a great deal in the first six months of 2025.

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Frida’s Theme Music

Yes, it is the Fourth of July in 2025, Independence Day in the United States. May the spirit of the 4th and its ideals of freedom, justice, and equality be with you wherever you may be in the world.

Not an overly warm day on this Ashlandia holiday Frida. Now sitting at 55 F, clouds shroud the sky and cancel the sun. Today’s high will be just 78 F.

Thunderstorms roamed the region late yesterday afternoon, putting us on wildfire alert. Two are noted down in California, in the Klamath and Happy Camp. Both are lightning strike products.

Trump is out there and spreading garbage again. He never takes a break. This time he claims his ‘beautiful bill’ rescued two billion farms. Sure. And he’s pretending that the social security tax exemption for seniors is for everybody. Maybe he’s lying; maybe he just doesn’t know. There’s often an appearance that he’s not connected to what’s going on. Just wondering how many people he’ll have ICE disappear to celebrate the holiday.

Going with Bruce Bruuuuuuce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” for the holiday. Kind of has The Neurons snickering over using an angry anti-war song that many mistakenly think is patriotic as the theme song on this holiday celebrating independence is in my morning mental music stream.

Got coffee. Heading down to Pam’s house to join in a buffet, see old friends, meet new ones, and watch the parade flow with stops and jerks down Siskiyou onto Main Street. The parade starts early this year to beat the heat. Have a better one. And away we go.

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Wenzda’s Wandering Thoughts

They call it sticker shock. My wife and I labeled it a friggin’ kick in the head.

We decided to make brownies for our annual Fourth of July gathering. To give it an Independence Day flavor, red, white, and blue chocolate M&Ms would be added to the top. I hustled to the store to buy said M&Ms.

First stop, Bi-Mart, didn’t have them. Second stop, Albertson’s, did. One size: 38 ounces.

38 ounces. Seriously? Who needs that many M&Ms? But if I need to…I guess…

$15.99. On sale. Marked down from $17.99.

Get out of here. What are these, organic M&Ms hand-wrapped by virgins in gold foil?

Neither price was acceptable to me. As a boomer, I remember M&Ms as something I bought a little bag of for a quarter. Last time that I bought a pound of M&Ms, they were like $5. Even a pound bag seemed more than enough, and this wasn’t that many years ago. What are people doing, spooning M&Ms into their mouths?

The world has gone friggin’ nuts. I really am channeling the old codger in me, aren’t I?

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The Writing Moment

The coffee shop had net problems today. Shrugging that away, I told myself, “Just write and check the net later.” Two and a half hours later, I’d finished 2300 words and the story had progressed as if I had some notion of what the hell was going on.

The Hunger Band was on my stomach’s center stage by then, their first notes careening through the rest of my bod. Coffee shop net still down, I listened to the Hunger Band’s sorrowful lyrics about dying of starvation and decided, “Yes, I’ve written enough. Time to go home and eat.”

Now to explore the kitchen to see what the Hunger Band will find acceptable. Salad? Maybe. Burrito?

Hmmm.

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Frida’s Wandering Thoughts

I was ravenous. I carry sufficient emergency energy stores (fat) on my body that starvation didn’t come up as a serious concern except for my stomach’s urgency to refill. It bellowed complaints like an irritated wooky. Much of this is diet limitations. I’m on low salt for hyper tension, and still remained constrained by my oral surgery. It’s healing well but missing molars and recovering surgical sites disrupt the biting, and chewing, and swallowing routine. It’ll be over in four to six months, so that’s just a temp thing.

I’ll be pleased to see June 2025 finish. Frustrating, disappointing, wearying, and just plain sad, that month holed my energy during its 30-day reign, and my soul is despondent. Personally, June of 2025 will remain a strong memory because it was memorably messed up. I’m putting high hopes on July and the rest of 2025. July’s first week features two dental appointments, my annual physical, and natal day #69, so the beginning is loaded with potential.

For the record, I think Natal Day #69 could be good song title, with the right music behind it.

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