Category Archives: Diversions

The stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere.

menu plan Monday, Shopping

In which Nichole may or may not have stolen a salad

This is the third or fourth or fifth week that I’ve planned to have a rotisserie chicken and a salad for dinner one night, and after many hours of ferrying the children hither and yon, today I finally took my free-chicken-and-a-family-salad coupon over to Whole Foods.

The chicken part was pretty straightforward. I picked up a rotisserie chicken, and I put it in the cart. Done and done. The salad, though, I wasn’t sure about. Whole Foods has a vast array of salads and salad bars, and I wasn’t entirely sure what the coupon meant when it said “a free family salad.” So I asked one of the cute millennial people on staff.

“Hi,” I said. “When this coupon says ‘family salad,’ what exactly does it mean?”

“One of those in the cooler under the ‘Good Stuff to Eat’ sign,” the Cute Millennial Gelato Girl said, gesturing in the general direction of the coolers. She didn’t say “Good Stuff to Eat,” exactly, because that isn’t what the sign said. But when I was there I remembered what she said and I found it.

Pixabay didn’t give me any results when I asked it for a free stock photo of a cute millennial, but it did give me this when I asked for a picture of gelato. // photo by Daria Yakovleva
So those directions narrowed it down from the 16,870 salads available at Whole Foods to about 3,457 salads. And I still wasn’t sure exactly which one the coupon was talking about. But I figured the Cute Millennial Gelato Girl wouldn’t steer me wrong, so I grabbed a pasta salad in a larger box instead of a pasta salad in a smaller box — because the “family salad” oughta be the bigger one, right? — and I went to the checkout.

“Are these vegan brownies good?” I asked the Cute Millennial Checkout Girl.

“They are so good,” said the Cute Millennial Vegan Checkout Girl. “That’ll be $10.79.”

I did have a box of 99-cent macaroni and cheese and, suddenly, a vegan brownie, so I wasn’t surprised that the whole order wasn’t free. But I was surprised that a vegan brownie and a 99-cent box of macaroni and cheese came to $10.79.

“Didn’t the coupon cover the chicken and the salad?” I asked.

“Oh no, not that salad,” she said. “It has to be a green salad. You can go ahead and check out and then just grab one of the green salads.”

This is what Pixabay offers up when you ask it for “vegan.” I’m going to go ahead and assume she doesn’t know much about brownies, either. // photo by Croisy.
A green salad. OK. I finished checking out with my free chicken, my 99-cent macaroni and cheese and my vegan brownie, and I went back to the Good Stuff to Eat cooler. Armed with the new knowledge the Cute Millennial Vegan Checkout Girl had imparted unto me, I discovered that I now had only 145 salads from which to choose.

So I chose one, and I went to the express line.

“Hello,” I said to the Cute Millennial Checkout Guy. “I’ve already checked out, but I got the wrong salad for my coupon and I want to make sure I have the right salad because I don’t want to accidentally steal a salad.”

“Oh no,” he said, “not that salad. The one you want is about the same size, but it’s not round.”

Downtrodden but not yet defeated, I went back to the Good Things to Eat cooler. I was now faced with only two options: A green salad in a square container, and a green salad in a rectangular container.

And I — I took the one in the square plastic, and I don’t know if it made all the difference or any difference because I did not stop to ask.

But there are two things I do know:

  • I need the Cute Millennials of Whole Foods to understand that I am an old dotard who needs very specific instructions. Like maybe you could just hand me the right salad? Thanks.
  • That vegan brownie was not so good. I’m sorry to say it, Cute Millennial Vegan Checkout Girl, but I think you’ve forgotten what a brownie should taste like.

    • This was the first result Pixabay offered when I asked for ‘cash register.’ I’m beginning to think Ashton Kutcher is running Pixabay. // photo by annca

    Anywho, here’s what we’re having for dinner this week:

    Monday: Rotisserie chicken and a salad
    This’ll be some combination of cheese, bread, ham and a saute pan.

    Tuesday: Cracker Barrel chicken
    This is a ridiculously easy recipe. It’s meant to be a copycat recipe for Cracker Barrel’s “grilled” chicken tenders, which are delicious and you can’t tell me different.

    Wednesday: Korean BBQ tacos
    I found a Korean BBQ slow cooker sauce at Aldi’s a few weeks ago. It sounded promising.

    Thursday: BLAs
    That’s a Bacon Lettuce and Avocado sandwich, because tomatoes are gross.

    Friday: Grandma’s choice
    Rockford and I will be embarking on our annual Weekend of 1,000 Films — in which we try to watch as many of the Best Picture nominees as we can squeeze in — so Grandma is in charge of dinner.

    Hungry for more? Check out the Menu Plan Monday linkup at OrgJunkie.

    presidential biographies

    In which Nichole learns about Martin Van Buren, idioms and party politics

    Let’s talk for a bit about the eighth president of these United States of America.

    I don’t recall learning much of anything about Van Buren in school. Other than a goofy turn on Seinfeld and an Ezra Pound canto, we don’t see a whole lot of him in pop culture, either. So I was surprised to read that he actually had a huge influence on our current political system. He basically pulled together a ragtag group of politicians who more or less believed the same thing and said “Hey guys, let’s form a nationwide system of connections and influence and call it the Democratic Party!” But here’s the funny thing: Nobody knows exactly how he did it. He was a very behind-the-scenes mover and shaker, and because he seemed to get things done through slight-of-hand (and he was short), people called him “The Little Magician.”

    I had a hard time finding a biography of Van Buren, which seems to be the start of a trend from MVB through Buchanan. If anyone has a Franklin Pierce bio they’d like to part ways with, I will take it. Anyway, I ended up with “Martin Van Buren” by Ted Widmer. It’s part of the American Presidents series, and I enjoyed it well enough that I’m hoping to find the rest of the books in the series.

    So here’s a bit of what I learned about Martin Van Buren.

    You too can pledge your allegiance to MVB for the low, low price of $19.99. Click on the graphic to buy the T-shirt. This is not an advertisement, nor will I make any money off the sale.

    Martin Van Buren was the first president to be born in the newly independent United States of America. He grew up poor in Kinderhook, New York, where his parents owned a tavern that just happened to be frequented by one Aaron Burr. Martin left school at age 13 and was sent to live and work in New York City with an influential rich guy from Kinderhook named William Van Ness, who was a pal of Burr’s. Burr took Martin under his wing, and a scurrilous rumor started going around that MVB was actually his son! Scandal!

    Martin eventually became a lawyer — which was more of an apprentice situation than a law-and-lots-of-debt thing in those days — and in 1812 he won a seat in the state senate where, as Widmer puts it, “power began to flow to Van Buren.”

    In 1821 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. John C. Calhoun was the first person to greet him in DC, and they were card-playing buddies before they became mortal enemies. Ain’t that always the way? Their falling out had more to do with Van Buren befriending and backing Andrew Jackson for the presidency than it did with whist or whatever they were playing, though. And listen to this dirty bit of business from Calhoun! So Jackson sent Van Buren to England to serve as minister to England. Van Buren gets there, drinks a lot of ale with Washington Irving and hangs out with the royals a bit, only to find out that the Senate voted against his appointment. And guess who cast the deciding vote? John Crabapple Calhoun.

    But then later Jackson let everyone know he wanted Van Buren to be the next president, and even though:

  • a lot of political cartoonists made fun of his colorful, flamboyant fashion sense (I did not see that coming) and his stature;
  • some old-school power brokers hated the two-party system he’d helped foster;
  • some people thought he was too Northern;
  • but other people thought it was pro-slavery
    he won the election. At the time, he was the youngest guy ever elected president.

    And then everything went sideways.

    MVB became president in 1837, when the country was kind of entering its adolescence. The Panic of 1837 put a bit of a damper on Americans’ enthusiasm for all things America, and people were starting to get the sense that maybe America had some faults.

    The Panic got its start because there was unregulated growth and loose credit and an unfavorable trade agreement with England, and when Ireland and England wanted their money and America couldn’t pay? The Panic of 1837 turned out to be the worst financial catastrophe in the United States until the crash of 1929! Bad news for pretty much everyone, but one Cornelius Roosevelt — aka Teddy’s Granddad — managed to scoop up lots of property on the cheap and get good and filthy rich in the process. So without The Panic, we might not have had the Presidents Roosevelt. We might have missed out on “Moby Dick,” too, since author Herman Melville took to the seas after his brother lost his business.

    Another tidbit I found interesting was the way a wealthy guy in New York described groups of people protesting the high price of flour. He called them “a convention of loafers from all quarters of the world.” I’m hearing definite echoes of the “These punks wouldn’t have time to protest if they had jobs” sentiments that I see frequently on Facebook. The more things change, huh?

    After the Panic of 1837, Americans started asking just what sort of place they wanted their country to be. The one big glaring issue was slavery, a topic on which Martin Van Buren had never been forthcoming. He seems to have tried to maintain a centrist position, which is gross in retrospect. It didn’t go over well then, either, because as he was trying to hold to the center, the country was pulling farther and farther apart and everyone found more and more reasons to be angry at Van Buren. And when the opposition’s new nationwide propaganda machine — modeled after Van Buren’s own Democratic Party network — put William Henry Harrison forth as their champion (complete with a totally fabricated poor-kid back story and a lot of catchy tunes!), Martin Van Buren lost in a big way.

    (The folks campaigning for him called him “Ol’ Kinderhook,” and his supporters shortened that to “OK.” And that idiom has never left us.

    Even if I forget everything else about Martin Van Buren, I hope I remember that he ushered “OK” into our vernacular.)

    So former President Martin Van Buren went back home to Kinderhook. He did some traveling, he started writing his biography, he had a wildly unsuccessful run for the presidency with the Free Soil Party, and he had one of the first indoor, flush toilets in the area installed.

    When Van Buren’s ancestor left the Netherlands for the new world, he didn’t even have a last name. And then his great-great-great-etc-grandson ended up becoming president and having a state-of-the-art toilet. A true Drake-ian tale.

    Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs, but always by exciting the multitude. This first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results; the second is the resort of geniuses and transforms the universe.

    — Martin Van Buren

    • Reading

    What Nichole read in 2017

    I’d set a goal of reading 45 books this year, and I only made it to 34. I was determined to finish “John Quincy Adams” this year, and I did it. But it was a slog and I had to stop reading other things to do it. I’m going to aim for 40 in 2018.

    I didn’t know much about Trevor Noah other than that he’d taken over at “The Daily Show,” so I wasn’t really interested when I saw he’d written a biography. But then I was out of things to read and “Born a Crime” was available as a digital download from the library, so I figured I’d try it. I’m glad I did. It ended up being my favorite read of the year.





    Once again, many thanks to the good folks at Goodreads for tabulating all of this for me.