On Things That Are Rad

In which we discover a variety of items that can be quantifiably described as "rad."

My post for the week is a little earlier than normal due to stumbling onto some cool stuff over the weekend and today.

On Saturday I was on Facebook and my friend Matt had this written on his wall courtesy of his wife Ashley:  Old Spice ad: 'We're not saying Old Spice body wash will make your man smell like a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it.' I was intrigued and decided to discover if this was indeed an Old Spice add.  That is when I found the following.


Also this.

For a while now I have felt that Old Spice has some of the most consistently funny adds around. These do nothing to change that opinion.

I also discovered the work of graphic artist Brandon Schaefer who makes some pretty sweet original movie posters based off of classic films.  Here are my two favorites, if they were still in print I would totally think about buying one, or both, of them¹.

A few months ago I talked about Arrested Development, one of my favorite television shows.  Two of the actors from said show, Will Arnett and David Cross, are currently staring² in a show based out of the UK called The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret³.  Unfortunately it is only available overseas at the moment, but the first episode is up on Youtubes in three parts.  Watch it while you can, I don't know how long it will be before it gets taken down.  Warning: these are NOT safe for work viewing (language).







Blogmendment 10:21pm

While writing this blog, and even after I finished, I kept thinking that there was something I wanted to write about but was forgetting.  Then, during dinner, I remembered.  There is a movie coming out in April that looks hilarious, and got some great early reviews.  Here is the red band trailer (which means the trailer is R rated so you will have to enter a birth date so don't watch this at work).


Those are the rad things I found this week. What have you got?
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¹ In actuality I would most likely agonize about whether or not I should buy them, then end up not buying them, and always wonder if I should have bought them.
² Okay, so technically it stars David Cross is the star, but Arnett is classic in the scenes he is in.
³ This is just a fantastic name.

On Filling Days Filled With Snow

In which daily activities are cataloged and discussed.

We've had a lot of snow this winter.  Not as much as the east coast, but it has snowed almost every week for the last two months.  During that time we kept getting these winter weather warnings from the national weather service, and each time the amount of snow would be way less than was predicted.  On this last Sunday I checked the weather reports and saw that we were expected to get a little snow, they were calling for about an inch or two.  The school I work at is a county school and a lot of the kids live on back roads so I went to bed thinking that we might have a two hour delay the next morning.

At 5:30 the next morning my phone rang, here is the conversation that I had:

Me: Hello
Burkhart: Hey man, no school today.
Me: Awesome, thanks brother.
Burkhart: Go team¹.

When I got up a few hours later and went out to clean my car off so I could go to the gym I discovered that we ended up getting more like 3.5 to 4 inches of snow, way more than we got during any of the "warnings" the past weeks.  Monday afternoon I got another call from Aaron telling me that we didn't have school Tuesday, which wasn't all that surprising.  Then on Tuesday afternoon I got another call that we would be off Wednesday as well.  That was a shock.  Apparently Greene County, where I work, only has four snow plows for the whole county².  One plow managed to drive off a road and into a ditch, one broke down.  Due to a lack of funding there isn't enough money to pay for overtime, so when the two working plows reach the end of their shifts they have to just stop.  And thus, three days off and counting.

So what do you do with all that time off?  Good question.  Here are some of the things I did, with some thoughts thrown in for your enjoyment.


Monday

• Cleaned the snow off my car.  This is something that I always do, and I do it completely.  I don't just clean the windshield, I clear off all the windows, the hood, the roof, the trunk, the headlights and the license-plate.  It boggles my mind when I see people driving around with huge piles of snow on their roof, peering through small section of cleared windshield, headlights on but covered with snow.  Please know that if I ever pass you and you are driving a car like that I will be judging you.  Just kidding³.
• Went to the gym.  I have come to enjoy riding the recumbent exercise bike while reading a book.  It makes the time fly by faster than anything else I have discovered. 
• Watched the first half of Kingdom of Heaven (2005).  The original movie got pretty mediocre reviews.  However, I had heard good things about the directors cut.  Ridley Scott had added around 45 minutes of footage back in.  I was very impressed.  It was an ambitious looking at the roles that religion played during the Crusades, but it was able to go beyond just "Christians were evil" or "kill the Muslims."  Scott makes a point to show that both the Christians and the Muslims believed that God would show who was right through the battles they had, and yet doesn't belittle the faith that the people had.  He also investigates how some in the church used the Lords name for their own gain.  Plus the action scenes were pretty great.
• Community dinner.  I made sauteed apples and sausage and a tater tot casserole.  It was tasty.  After that we talked about the various groups throughout Bloomington that we work with and how we can be praying for them.  We ended the evening with some Super Mario Bros. Wii.

Tuesday

• Gym again.  Going to the gym early in the morning is really nice.  It's quiet and all of the machines are open.  Ran a little over two miles while listening to an audio book.
• Finished Kingdom of Heaven.  Here are some of the people in the movie.  Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, and Ed Norton⁴.  Something that I really appreciated about the movie was that it didn't spell everything out to you and left parts up to the viewer's interpretation, especially in regards to Orlando Bloom's character.
• Played Super Mario Brothers 2.  My favorite of the NES Mario games.  Though I was playing on my SNES.  It's just so goofy and fun.  Side note, it wasn't originally a Mario game, but when Nintendo brought it over from Japan they made it one.
• Fat Tuesday celebration.  The Roses and some folks from the Catholic Worker came over and we celebrated Fat Tuesday in style.  Which meant pizza and alcohol⁵.  Then we played some four player Mario on the Wii, which was way more fun, but way tougher after some beer.

Wednesday

• Egg and sausage breakfast.  Semi-scrambled eggs⁶ and frozen sausage links.  The eggs, which came from the Corry's farm, were delicious.  The sausage not so much.
• Trip to the dump.  Our trash and recycling overfloweth, thus did Tim and I trek to the solid waste station on Oard Road to remove it.  There was a nice old guy who helped us with our stuff, he even sorted our glass for us.  What a rad dude.
• Finished a book.  Patriot Acts by Greg Rucka, I had read it before but I got the book that precedes this one for my dad for Christmas.  He let me borrow it and I am going to let him read this one.  But I figured I would re-read it before i passed it along.
• Wrote a blog post.  The one you just finished reading.

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¹ This is pretty much what he says every time he calls me in the morning.
² At 522 square miles Greene County is the 5th largest county in the state.
³ But seriously, if you do this you are terrible.
⁴ Norton does an amazing job in a very unexpected role.
⁵ I had too much of both.
⁶ Crack the eggs right onto the pan and then scramble them while they are cooking.  For a bonus throw some shredded cheese on there too.

On Making Something From Nothing

In which a magic trick of sorts is performed and pictures are utilized after a brief hiatus.

Pop quiz, hotshot¹.  You've taken a vow of poverty and you only work a part-time job.  But you still want to eat a delicious, well-balanced meal that includes, among other things, fresh fruits and veggies.  What do you do?  What do you do?

No you don't shoot the hostage.  Silly Keanu, that's your answer to everything.  For a more peaceful solution I'd invite you to do what my friends at the Catholic Worker do.  They go around to grocery stores and get fruits and vegetables that the store is getting rid of².  My friend Carrie talked about it here.

Once you return from the store your kitchen table may look like this:

So you've got all this food that needs to be used rather quickly.  But even spread among four houses there are only so many apples that one man can eat.  Once solution is to bake a whole bunch of apple crisp (which was Carrie's solution) however, you still run the risk of it going bad.  Will suggested that we can a bunch of it so that it will keep on a more long term basis.  Genius.  So the next morning we got to work.

Our plan was to stew the tomatoes, make apple butter from the apples, and make a hot pepper jelly from the peppers.  Tim and I went to Will's house at about 9 in the morning to get started³.  Tim's job was to peel, core and slice the apples (I think we had like six pounds).  My job was to peel the tomatoes using the following process.  First I placed the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water.  Once the skin split I put them in ice water for a few minutes.  Then I simply peeled the skins right off.  Next I cored and quartered the tomatoes so that they could be put into cans.

After this the cans get lids and are boiled in water so that the lids seal and the tomatoes cook all the way through.

Tim's apples were cooked in pots with a little bit of water so that they softened up.  Then we through them in a food processor and back into the pot they went.  This time with cinnamon, nutmeg and a whole lot of sugar.  You bring the whole mess to a boil and just let it go until the apple butter thickens up.  Will said that it was on the stove from 10 until around 3:30 when he finally canned it, but it could have stayed on even longer.

As for the peppers, they were cored and quartered as well.  The green and red peppers had most of their seeds removed, the smaller ones kept their seeds.  After that it was a trip to the food process and then into a pot with some sugar.  After a few minutes you add some pectin so that the jelly will set.  Then boil it and can it.  If you have never had hot pepper jelly I highly recommend it.  It is great with cheese and crackers.

This was my first time canning vegetables and it was very fun, though it helped to be doing it with Will and Tim, and it was a great way to utilize the food we had gotten.  The total cost of the whole endeavor was around $13.  For that we came away with four quarts and a pint of tomatoes and something like 10 pints of apple butter⁴, unfortunately the pectin didn't set so the jelly didn't turn out right.  But hopefully we can still use it in stir fry.

So there you have it, something from nothing.  If you want to stop by for a little dab of D.A.B.⁵ come on by and I will throw a slice in the toaster for you⁶.

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¹ "I saw this movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode! I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down."
² Aka they go dumpster diving, which creeped me out at first, until I realized that these stores get rid of perfectly good fruit.
³ Hooray for snow days!
⁴ A quick google search has apple butter priced at $5 a pint, so we made $50 worth of apple butter alone.
⁵ Dumpster Apple Butter.
⁵ We got a bunch of Bakehouse bread from the Saharamart if you want to double up on your free stuff.

On Fulfilling A Birthday Wish....Kind Of

In which a contractual obligation almost backfires until it doesn't.

[My friend Seth Rowe¹ recently had a birthday².  As a gift I decided to give him the option to tell me what to blog about, because, firstly, his blog was inspirational in the creation of my blog, and secondly, I'm cheap.  He wanted me to write about my second visit to Columbus (which hasn't happened) or to write about the trip that I would be going on in the next month (which was news to me).  I took his idea and ran with it...]

There is a place, not too far from here,
Where the Scioto and the Olentangy meet.
Long ago, in olden days, this was the new frontier
But now, instead, you'll find idiots not known for being discreet.

O-H-I-O they shout,
Whether you want them to or not.
You shake your head at the stupid lout
Living in this place manners forgot.

Filthy rivers make it tough
To finish a disc golf game.
Wise visitors say "That's enough."
And return from whence they came.

Columbus is a terrible place whether sleeping or awake,
And I'll tell anyone who asks of me, visiting there is a mistake.

Yet, when I think of my good friends,
Whose names are Seth and Julie,
I must see the city through a new lens,
And thus, speak to you truly.

You'll find Settlers there, a garden gnome,
And late night conversation.
I would get to see their new home
While enjoying a short vacation.

Plenty of laughter will abound
During the time that I am there,
As well as talks that are profound,
With good friends, for whom I deeply care.

So Seth, and Julie, grab a pen, and prepare a note to take.
Beware the Ides of March because I'll be there over my spring break³.


Happy Birthday Seth!


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¹ Of "The Summer of Seth and Josh".
² It was his 26th by my count.
³ Spring break runs from the 13th-21st and the Ides of March is the 15th.