Or, rather, she’s ready to put her husband on a plane. Cindi, the winner of the TSA toiletries bag, notes that her significant other travels a lot for business.
Stay tuned for Friday’s giveaway, which will be either a PF book or a gift card (but not an Amazon one).
Earlier this week I went hiking with my niece and her two boys. On the way to the trail another hiker told us to be alert: Bears had recently been seen in the area.
We can now attest that the bears are still in the area.
Melissa Allison was the one whom the random number generator loved best this week. She gets the $20 Amazon gift card. Everyone else gets to try again on Friday.
My first week here has been fun: Little sleep, but plenty of family, friends and food. The weekend was given to attending (and recovering from) a reunion of current and former women of the Anchorage Daily News in picturesque Hope, Alaska. This was a great group of kickass wimmen, and of course the food was major.
Oh, and yesterday my niece and her boys and I ran into a couple of bears while hiking.
I never cared much for yogurt. It generally seemed too sour to me, unless it was turned into tzatziki sauce on a gyro sandwich.
Apparently I just never had the right kind of yogurt.
I’d heard that the homemade version was better than the commercial kind. I’d also read about people making yogurt in a slow cooker. After looking online for instructions I settled on a slight variation of the process described at A Year of Slow Cooking.
And then I improved on it.
I can remember my grandfather grousing about the price of cigarettes. He swore he would quit when it went up past 35 cents a pack.
It did, and he did.
Now I know how he felt, although my particular vice is brown and fizzy and gives me reward points. At an Anchorage supermarket I was shocked to find Diet Coke selling for $8.19 per 12-pack. Thank goodness there’s no sales tax here.
That works out to 68 cents a can. It won’t break the bank. But really? More than eight dollars for a 12-pack? For something that I can’t even get drunk off of?
If so, ask South County Girl — she has an extra ticket, now that she’s been declared the winner of the AMC movie giveaway.
It takes me forever to use up a roll of paper towels. I wish I’d written the date inside the cardboard tube of the roll currently in my kitchen. It’s been there at least a couple of years. Even though I’ve been traveling a lot, that’s still a long time for one roll to have been operating – and to be only about 50% reduced.
It’s not that I’m particularly neat. It’s that I see no reason to use paper towels when I have plenty of rags.
Sure, paper towels are convenient. But they’re expensive, too. Why use and toss wads of paper when I can use a piece of cloth, launder it and use it again? And if you’re just draining salad greens or wiping up spilled water, you don’t even need to wash the cloth – just hang it up to dry.
Call that eco-friendly if you like. I prefer to think of it as common sense.
I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, for 17 years. About 15 of those years were spent in a trailer whose flat roof needed to be shoveled. My now-ex husband never acknowledged the existence of household or maintenance duties, so I was the one who clambered up.
I was then and am now afraid of heights. The second-worst part of the chore was stepping off the ladder and onto the roof.
The worst part? Getting back on, because there was nothing to hold onto save the top of the ladder, which extended a couple of feet past the roof line.
The first time I looked at the job I knew that getting back down was going to be scary. That’s why I came up with the strategy of leaving a patch of snow next to the ladder.
I’ll be heading back to Seattle soon, but I can’t leave the Last Frontier without giving away some Alaskana.
MJ is the winner of the box o’ Christmas oddities, courtesy of RetailMeNot.com. I just returned from the post office. Maybe there will be a Christmas miracle, i.e., it will get there on time.
A whole bunch of you sure liked that bling mug, aka the “2 Carat Coffee Cup.” If you’re interested in getting one of your own, start your shopping here — and be sure to look for a coupon code, too.
In other news: