Do You Realize?

New Year, New Stuff

Hello, faithful (and not-so-faithful-but-who-could-blame you) reader(s)! I've had one or two kind people tell me they miss my blog. Thank you. To be honest, I miss my blog. I haven't written in a good long while, mainly because I've been content, but I miss it. So, my New Year's resolution is to start the blog up again, even though I'm still happy. How's that sound?

Don't answer that so quickly in the positive. The second most asked question I've been getting from Facebook friends lately is: How did you make those amazing looking Jello shots you have photos of from New Year's eve? So, today I'll share with you the wisdom of Jello shots. See? All that excitement over the return of my wit & wisdom, now wasted on Jello shots. Sorry.

As you may imagine, Eldest is home from college. When she learned we would be going to  Paul & Vera's for New Year's Eve, she made the oh-so-collegiate suggestion of making Jello shots. As someone had made some at a not-that-long-ago party and I remembered them being somewhat of a crowd-pleaser, even with our mostly-middle-aged friends, I decided that might be a fun, if not exactly good, idea. But, I also decided I wasn't going to produce boring, half-assed Jello shots either; if I'm putting in the time and effort to do this, mine will be memorable.

Via a website that would make your inner science geek laugh out loud with drunken glee, one which used the scientific method for making Jello shots, I found some scientific tips for some decidedly above average flavored Jello shots. I also found some tips that should be common sense to anyone with taste buds and a shady past: apparently Jello shots made with gin or bourbon taste like ass. Umm, I could have told you that, and I didn't even have to waste the time, money, or effort to make the damn things!

So, armed with scientific justification, I headed to the liquor store. An hour or so and several wasted stops later, I began to cook. Following you will find the basics of Jello shots, interjected with all the tongue in cheek you can stand.

1. Don't assume you have enough room in the fridge for Jello shots. Be prepared to take out the milk, orange juice, butter and/or eggs in order to make room, hopefully a whole shelf. Don't take out the wine. Simply relocate it to another shelf; milk and OJ are more dispensable.

 

2. The basic recipe for Jello shots is 8 oz. boiling liquid (generally not alcohol if you want good-tasting shots), small pkg. of Jello, and 8 oz. of cold liquid (alcohol, schnapps, or alcohol/water if the alcohol is strong enough. This can be manipulated in many surprising ways. For example, I used Starbuck's espresso roast coffee for the boiling water and used unflavored gelatin to make a super yummy coffee/Frangelico/Starbuck's creme liqueur concoction.

3. There are a few options for dispensaries for Jello shots: real shot glasses (not an option if you're making 120 Jello shots in 8 flavors), little paper pill cups that are used in hospitals everywhere (which your husband should NOT be asked to obtain, even if he is a doctor and should be able to hook you up), or little plastic cups (which come in teenie weenie 1 oz., which I think some hospitals might use, and don't have lids, or 2 oz., which are used by restaurants nationwide and are called "portion cups" or "souffle cups" and have handy lids, making for easy stacking). We finally found our cups at the liquor store, of all places; I guess savvy liquor store owners know that their clientele might need Jello shot cups.

 

4. A tip that I did NOT get until it was too late, and one that will definitely be used next time? Turn the cups upside down before refrigerating. Otherwise, most will need to employ the "Finger First" method of eating the Jello shot (see below). Tipsy, this isn't a big deal. Sober, some may be squeamish. Drunk, some may not be able to pull this off.

5. For maximum fun, make a variety of flavors and colors. I used a variety of liquors and liqueurs and had a good representation of color from the rainbow. Be creative.

6. Still have Jello shots well into the party? Play a drinking game with them! We used a very simple, but very fun, game that someone brought (which I've played many times, sans alcohol, and it was still fun), and after two rounds, we were making headway! After all was said and done, we had approximately ten of our one hundred twenty shots still standing.

7. Do not assume that just because something is a liqueur and not liquor that it isn't strong. I didn't get the hint that 99 Bananas liqueur was 99 proof. Mixed with (New!) Tropical Fusion flavored Jello, it produced a shot that barely gelled at the normal recipe proportions and did amazing puckery things to people's faces .

8. Do not play drinking games with two different sized shots. Some will invariably insist on reaching for the teenie weenie size when it's their turn to man up.

9. Coffee-flavored shots are good when dropped in a cup of coffee. They melt immediately & give you super-caffeinated, somewhat alcoholic goodness in a mug.

10. Berry Blue jello, while very pretty, really tastes like kitty ass, and therefore makes shots that sort of resemble kitty ass and turpentine. Or kitty ass and suntan lotion, if you happen to mix it with Malibu coconut rum. I will continue a quest to find something that tastes decent with it because of its important addition to the color variety, but I'm not really hopeful.

 

For those who want specific recipes, I don't remember specifics, as I was really just winging it myself. Generally, if I used a low-alcohol-content schnapps, I used 3/4 cup with 1/4 cup vodka to bolster the potency as the cold liquid. If you use high-alcohol-content liquor (or, you know, 99 Bananas liqueur), it might be wise to use water to cut the potency if you're aiming for palatable. The final flavors (and our clever names for them)? Maliblu (Berry Blue Jello with Malibu coconut rum), Cherry Cordial (black cherry Jello with vodka), Schnapps My Cherry (cherry Jello with Peach schnapps/vodka), Sour Midori (Melon Fusion Jello with Midori/sweet & sour mix/vodka), Emerald City (lime Jello with Midori/vodka), Tropicana (Tropical Fusion Jello with 99 Bananas liqueur), Just Peachy (apricot Jello with Peach schnapps/vodka), and Starbuck (unflavored gelatin, coffee, Starbuck's creme liqueur, and Frangelico).

Since I would be a bad person if I didn't state the obvious, don't consume all these Jello shots & think you can drive. They have more alcohol than you think in them. Have a Designated Driver, walk, or take a cab. Be safe. That is all.

Asking the Wrong Questions

This video has surfaced, prompting people to question whether our beef is safe. It shows a cattle worker torturing a dairy cow who is too sick to walk into the slaughterhouse. (Unless an animal can walk in unassisted, it is not supposed to be slaughtered for human consumption.) Though that is a valid question (for those who don't do buy pasture-raised & finished beef), the question people should be asking is whether humanity itself is safe when there are members who are willing to look into the eyes of a weaker species and then do these things to them. Certainly the possibility of their willingness to treat children the same comes to mind. I'm sure the wives of the two workers pictured here are proud of their husbands.

According to this video, we're just monkeys that can operate forklifts. Animals, just like the others. (Warning to all my religious readers: you will be offended by this video, I'm pretty sure.) This video was passed along to me by a friend of Eldest; Eric, you are quite the fabulously intelligent and charming guy. Dance, monkeys, dance!

Science(ish) Friday (and where I've been)

Sometimes (okay, most of the time) all I want is for life just to slow down a little (or a lot). This past week or so has been no exception. This week:

*My mom suffered a bout of acute rejection. Not unusual for a liver transplant patient, but not a good thing, either. After four (five?) days of intense prednisone and anti-rejection drug therapy, her biopsy yesterday finally came back to say the rejection had reversed. Whew!

*We found out Youngest has to have mastoid surgery for a cholesteotoma this Tuesday. He has had to be hospitalized for mastoiditis once before, so it's not a complete surprise. Before a lot of antibiotics were discovered, mastoiditis was pretty common, and death was an unfortunate side effect.

*My precious babykitty Gilda has to have yet another ultrasound to determine whether she has some sort of intestinal cancer or not.

*We found out Eldest's boyfriend (who went away to college this year) has been lying to her (and us) about his partying and drinking for months now.

*I found my first major scratch on Pru.

Now that I have all that off my chest, let me tell you about one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time: National Geographic's Genographic Project.

For $100.00, you can get a kit to send in a buccal swab. National Geographic will test your mitochondrial DNA (or, if you're male, you could also choose to have your Y-chromosome DNA tested instead). They will trace your DNA to its origins in Africa and provide you with a map of the migratory patterns that your ancestors took, which landed you where you are today. Quite a fascinating concept, in my opinion. (My friend RedMolly does this science thing a whole heckuva lot better than I do, but I did want to make a mention of it.)

Entomological Update

After a truly traumatizing night involving our guinea pig, rabbit, and thousands of our unidentified Nasty Buggers, samples of the offending critters were sent off to Texas A&M to be identified by an entomologist. The verdict is that chiggers are not, indeed, our culprits. No, it couldn't be anything that mundane. Noooooo... We have Ornithonyssus mites. Depending on the species, their hosts are either wild birds or roof rats; the two look so much alike, it's very tricky telling them apart (the mites, not the birds & rats).

So, using common sense, remembering our roof rat revelers that stayed around for 3 weeks or so, and utilizing the knowledge that the mites had attacked the guinea pig, but not our birds, I believe we are looking at an attack of Ornithonyssus Bacoti, the Tropical Rat Mite. According to Texas A&M, one usually notices the mites once the hosts have died or left the building (the rat bastards left after they finished off all the kitty treats in the TV cabinet). Although they can't live off human blood, they will readily bite them, causing all sorts of hellish itching. And apparently, they aren't terribly uncommon... then why haven't I ever heard of them?!?!?

Anyway, armed with pyrethrin and diatomaceous earth, I'm off to war. Any other suggestions welcome.

Nasty Little Buggers

Okay, I'm hoping that this post will draw 47 comments, because I'm desperate!

Some subversive critters of the most vicious variety are eating me alive in bed at night. Itchy, itchy bites, and over the last 4 or 5 days, I probably have a dozen or two bites on me. I have found two or three tiny little unidentified buggers, and when I mash them, they explode with blood. And I do mean TINY... as in about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

My first thought was bedbugs... crap! But, I have inspected the seams of the mattress & boxsprings, and between the two, and I can find absolutely ZERO evidence of that. From what I can gather, bedbugs are pretty easily visible to the eye, about the size of a non-engorged tick.

Now I'm leaning toward chiggers. But, can chiggers live indoors? We have indoor/outdoor dogs, one of whom sleeps with us at night... could she have picked them up in the grass, transferred them to our bed, where they are having all-night drunken raves in our bed? And what can we do to get rid of them?

I'm really starting to swerve psychotically toward delusional parasitosis at this point. AAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!

Note: My stats tell me that this post is one of my most viewed. If you have come here through Google and are having an unsolvable insect mystery, you can find an update on our situation in this post. Good luck!

Monday Meanderings, Part Deux

So, Mark has taken this week off work, as well (the result of not taking all of his vacation time during the rest of the year), and it always seems to happen that I don't post when he's here at home... I've also noticed that the whole household has a veil of tardiness hanging over all its members when he's home. But, as usual, my brain actually does work when he's here, I just don't post about it when it happens. All of which leads to Monday Meanderings. Where has my mind been meandering this week?

Garbage Land. Fascinating book, and I'm only on the 4th chapter. I'll post a little more as I get further along. Right now, I'm just thinking about a good chunk of New York actually built on top of garbage, and it's quite amazing to think about.

Monsanto. I really had no idea how mind-numbingly detrimental this company is to the public's health and wellbeing: from saccharin to styrofoam, Roundup to Agent Orange, genetically modified foods to bovine growth hormones. And what's up with the whole pig breeding patent?  That's more than just a little creepy.

Corn. Speaking of Monsanto, I find myself looking at all corn with suspicion now. Is that corn in my wild bird feed genetically modified? What about my canned corn? And I've heard that corn syrup (which I use at least once a week for my gingerbread pancake recipe) is pretty much all genetically jacked-up.

Chemicals. We just paid $1000 to Terminix to inject our soil with termite poison. I know it's buried, and I know it's supposed to be totally "safe" to be around, but I'm still more than a little discomfited by it. (There goes my hope of growing anything "organic" around my house.) But, it's either poison the termites, or let them eat the house. Neither sounds like a good option to me, just like the politicians around here.

Window screens. I'd love to be able to open our windows this spring & summer, but our windows don't have screens. Does anyone know if screens are easy to install? Do we have to hire someone to do it, or is it a DIY job? (In answer to the first anticipated question, screens are necessary in our house because we have 4 indoor cats and at least 3 outdoor dogs, not to mention that I have this extreme rabid aversion to flies.)

Ooooh, and how could I forget the religious nutcases that have been on my mind? Jerry Falwell and Stephen Baldwin, particularly. Now, I really don't have any problems, per se, with people's various religions. I may not necessarily accept their same views, but as long as they aren't pushing them on me, we'll all be fine. But when someone starts telling me that gays, lesbians, & the ACLU caused 9/11 and that my kids shouldn't watch the Teletubbies because "Tinky Winky is gay,"  it's time to part ways, my friend. (Now, if you were to pose the infinitely more intelligent argument that the kids shouldn't be allowed to watch the Teletubbies because they inhibit their language skills, I'm all ears.) And Stephen Baldwin (yes, one of those Baldwin brothers), the self-proclaimed "Jesus Psycho" that can't remember even six of the Ten Commandments? He's just scary crazy. Or maybe crazy scary. Even scarier, though? The rockin' feedback from his book at Amazon, which indicates there are a lot of Jesus Psychos out there.

And there you have a few of the things that have been on my mind this week. What about you? What's been on your mind?

Dear Meteorologists:

Obviously, between El Nino and Global Warming, the weather has become impossible to predict, as I calculate your accuracy as of late to be in the 4% range.

Please look for new work immediately. You're fired.

Thank you,
Lori

P.S. Before you leave, my hostas & I would like that rain you've been predicting here for 3 days now.