HazelStone

My husband also likes the Cracker Barrel cheese, but we found the Costco stuff was actually cheaper. Don't know if there's any warehouse stores near you but it may be worth a look. Also, there is a blog some lady runs to help you combine CVS sales and Extra Care bucks and manufacturer's coupons... simplycvsshopping.com I can't vouch for the recent posts, I'm in the mega-trip shopping pattern lately.

So what's the consistency of them? Is it dried cilantro? Or the soft crumblyness of a stock cube? For the garlic I'll just stick to whacking a clove HARD with the chef knife and make with the quick dice. My husband just quietly edges out of the kitchen then.

I was picking up a few things at the store and noticed the spice aisles had a lot of "sale" tags going. Buy one get one free! Every spice slot had the sale sticker on it (mostly McCormick). As I had a McCormick coupon, I thought "Sweet!" Get Sweetie's favorite spice blends for cheap! I told Sweetie about the sale and told him to take a look in case there were different spices he wanted. He noticed that all the sale tags on the McCormick stuff said "on Club spices" a.k.a. store brand. This was not just one or two misplaced tags- it was deliberate. GRRRRR!!

whoever does cloth diapers as a cottage industry might want to increase their advertising...

White pizza is pizza without the tomato sauce. You brush onto the crust a bit of olive oil and/or butter and some herbs. The toppings are the usual kind. But, you can be a little more adventurous with the toppings because you aren't clashing with the tomato sauce. Sweetie loves white pizza...another advantage is not having to deal with too much/too little sauce.

White pizza baked from scratch, with rosemary, mozzarella, tomato, and prosciutto.

Any other constraints? Though I didn't see any clarification if it's "maintenance" level of low carbs or ketosis as another asked... I did low carb diets for a while. The Pioneer Woman has a recipe I tried recently and I thought it pretty good: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2012/02/vegetarian-lettuce-wraps/ (minus the avocado, I like it but don't have any on hand much). My husband, Mr. Steak Addict was dubious but liked it too. A little borderline with the sweet corn. If you're on maintenance stage, quinoa is low GI. Another option is breakfast, Mexican style. Beans (refried or other), eggs, and a bit of salsa and/or crema agria (sour cream, but this variant is a lot thinner). spinach salad with vinaigrette, poached egg, and bacon crumbles mushroom soup egg drop soup (with guar or gelatin as thickener) moo shoo pork (sans pancake and heavier on the cabbage) Indian food- lots of stuff to do with beans and spinach or lentils. Not all of this cuisine is hot. onion soup salmon or tuna patties (crisp/crunchy is a bit too rare on that diet...) nuts (and I'd say yogurt but, dietary restriction) And then a lot is portion control. 3-4 oz serving of fish isn't really that much.

I just have to remind myself to check where the boundaries of "normal" are, and warn others if I've wandered outside the fence. Then again, many here have to do that anyway- and not because they laugh at database jokes.

You might want to check out the comic. It has a lot of math and programming jokes though, so be warned if that's not your thing. The cartoonist worked for NASA. There are also plenty of less-nerdy strips in the series.

I think my favorite so far is the "what if the glass really is only half full" installment.

My husband sent me the link to the latest one this morning...but going back a couple posts earlier there's a great one. "What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now - only rotated by an angle of 90 degrees?" http://what-if.xkcd.com/10/ Hey...it doesn't quite belong in RURR but it's still an interesting thought. Like if the aliens behind 1632 were a bit more ambitious...

I am currently reading "Wool," by Hugh Howey. It started as a short story and went over so well, the author continued it. The story is about a society shut into a missile silo, that has become a repressive regime. No one is ever allowed to speak of Outside and most of their history has been erased. Outside is painted as still an apocalyptic landscape that is death to enter and the punishment for dissent is to be banished Outside. The first book (really a novella) is available on Amazon for free. I knocked it out in two nights- so not long at all.

That may not be because of Obamacare; your employer may have changed the "guts" of your plan. Don't panic; this doesn't necessarily mean that the coverage has been made worse! Many employers have been (or are going to) go to a "self funded plan." Some megacorps just rent the insurance network and cover claims by themselves (charging/paying monthly premiums the actuaries figure out). Other medium/large employers just do a giant, company-wide deductible and pay minor/routine expenses themselves. This can save LOTS of money- which in a high-inflation environment means simply keeping your costs the same as before. Insurance plans covering every sniffle and having low deductibles/copays is horrifically expensive- because you're basically paying the insurance company to handle expected claims. At that point you are paying the normal expense and then some because the insurance company gets its part of the money too. At that point the plan isn't *insurance,* it's "health benefits." Since these plans have been the typical thing for so long, most people confuse the two. For various reasons we've become insulated from the actual cost of care- and so it's near impossible to get a cost estimate of routine stuff. There's other market distortions like government programs and the lawyers, etc. that screw up our system further. Otherwise paying for the minor stuff on your own would be more feasible. Even if we shook out a lot of the red tape, a fundamental shift in society blocks reform or return to the old ways- so many people can't be bothered to save a little money for the unexpected. Even those with good salaries, many still live paycheck to paycheck. Keeping a couple grand around for a minor procedure (which is what it costs in many countries, vs. $8-10K) isn't a given. If you have a high deductible plan, at least minor issues and tests are done at the network discount and not the inflated "retail price." The problem is, of course, that healthcare costs are so high that even a catastrophic policy eats up too much of the average person's budget. Let's not even go into Big Pharma and Americans being charged several times the price they sell it for in Europe.

Thanks for the suggestion, but my job is classified as "salaried," so I'm SOL there short of a high court's decision. So there's no signing in and out, but "expected" hours are about an hour a day longer than the theoretical schedule. I guess one could always subpoena the server logs. The longer I stay here the more I'm aiding/abetting this behavior though...

...I wouldn't have any non-mortgage debt. And I'd be refinancing the house with a significant additional payment. That's IT, I have got to find the energy to pursue the job search. I am way too non-confrontational...and in this job market you can ill afford pissing your boss off/standing up for yourself a bit. Boss says "we just have a few months that will be crazy as we get new clients on, but you'll have great opportunities after!"...which isn't very concrete. He said he was going to hire extra help...nope. He said I'd get a raise with decent performance at the six month mark...nope (been more than a year and they keep stalling on reviews). And WHAT, exactly will we gain for all our blood sweat and tears? Most rational bosses would at least toss out the likelihood of a bonus after the real money comes in. Since it's very, very hard for half my office to leave for a different place, Boss is taking full advantage of a mostly-captive audience. Oh and any collaborative efforts with the co-workers have died on the vine; the game now is "shove your work on someone else and backstab when they aren't looking." Sick of being jerked along...sick of being talked down to...lots of people are hurting for a job but managers have to remember that the GOOD employees usually have options...

I went grocery shopping this morning, a minor "replenish" trip at a store with middling prices. As I'm hunting for a couple odd items the store didn't have, Sweetie stopped at an impulse display. "Look! Pyrex pie pans at $1.19" Nice ones, with the fluted edges. The sign did indeed say $1.19. Well- I don't absolutely *need* these but it's an incredible price and worst case, I give one to a friend. I picked up two, and headed for the checkout. Ringing them up, Sweetie pointed out "hey, those pie plates aren't ringing up at sale price." Hang on, haven't put the stupid card in... the discounts get applied...and the pie pans get *discounted* by $1.19 rather than ringing it up at that price. Hmm, we think we see what went wrong- but I wasn't going to buy pie plates at the price it came out to be. Went to the customer service desk, they looked over the display- yep, someone screwed up the template and put the discount as the sale price. They gave us the "mistake" price (technically they have to) and we went home. I started cutting coupons out of this weekend's paper- saw something that made me laugh- a coupon for $1 off a Pyrex item. Had I done the coupons earlier rather than later, I could've gotten a pie pan for $.19 Hmm, maybe I should start making quiche again...

Uh oh... lots of people's breakfasts are going to get disrupted. Many down there don't bother refrigerating the eggs- they go through them fast enough. When I did study abroad students down there would just stick the carton on the bookshelf. That gave me a bit of a shock, given American-style rules for food safety. But I have fond memories of dormitory breakfasts of scrambled eggs, refried beans, and a bit of crema agria and salsa Good eggs, too! Flavorful unlike the ones you get in the grocery stores here. I think the Mexicans are going to be ticked to get ours.

Dedicated spam e-mail address. Virtual Machine. Trawl the coupon sites only from that setup. Just sayin'...

Bosch mixer Silpat stick blender

Congratulations! May I suggest keeping your homeowners deductible small for the first year or two? As you haven't been in control of the house, you never know what little things that may be lurking...the home inspector doesn't catch everything... ...yes, learned by experience (but I at least had the smaller deductible...)

Heh heh. I volunteered at Dragoncon a couple years. Dragoncon has the Miss Klingon Empire beauty pageant. THAT is something to see... Never made it to Gen Con though. Cons are fun! They re-assure me that I am not NEARLY as strange as "normal" people say! Was there a chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism there?

"You see, the snow on the roof is too heavy, you see, the ceiling will cave in. His brains are in terrible danger..." *flees*

I've spent a pretty large amount of time on the Internet. Grow up in a one stoplight town, and if you're not into football your socializing options are very limited. So, I've inhabited a few message boards as well. But something here is different. A certain je ne sais quoi... The other day it dawned on me. There are NO TROLLS here. I've seen some gentle disagreement and plenty of reasoned discussion... but no myopic college freshmen. No race-baiting, no "making money is eeeeeevil," no Evangelical Hard Atheists, no VEHMT members, no militant feminists...nothing. Really. I think the most...animated...debates I've seen here are about *how much* to help others and *how far* to out oneself trying to get friends to keep some bottled water packed and extra groceries in the house. Even moderated message boards have their fights. What the heck? Do Cat and Darlene have minions with cattle prods that they send to neighborhoods whose IP subnet is used by a problem poster? Dang...shoulda routed through Tor.

No earworm here. I don't know the song.

Holy moly. The article is rather light on details. If I were still working at an insurance agency I'd be looking over Progressive's contract just to find out where the hell that provision was. When I clicked on the story I was thinking maybe Progressive insured both parties in this case. One thing to keep in mind though is that you DO still have prove the "value" of the loss- which means mainly age and earning capacity. You can take out a bleep-ton of UM/UIM coverage and if you're 50 years old, children are grown, and you're making 25 grand a year...the payout's going to come to something less than the coverage limits you can get on mainstream auto policies. Cold? Yes. But a big part of an insurance company's job is to figure out the "value" of your life. Like evaluating the amount of life insurance you're trying to get. There will be some direct costs, even if it's just for the ambulance hauling you into the trauma center for someone to declare the death officially, and the funeral...if THOSE costs were being balked then yeah, gather the torches and pitchforks.