Way To Tie It Down 'Zon Boys
I recently made an order from my favorite place online, Amazon.com. But there was some difficulty in the supply chain which meant I got the following e-mail (snipped, emphasis added and redacted for publication):

We're writing about the order you placed on August 27 2010 (Order# redacted). Unfortunately, we are unable to ship the item(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when the item(s) may be delivered:

"That thing you wanted to buy from us"
Estimated arrival date: October 20 2010 - May 04 2011

If you still want us to ship the delayed items when they do become available (though they may arrive later than expected) please visit this address to approve the delay...

Now I hasten back into the story to say that the delivery is on the truck to be deposited on my doorstep today so I'm getting "That thing you wanted to buy from us" in, actually, very good time. But that estimated arrival date made me laugh out loud. "Dear customer, your order is expected to be delivered to you sometime during your remaining lifespan. We appreciate you business." Talk about lowering expectations and then exceeding them! It's a strange combination of very smart and just weird. Which is not a bad description for the range of experience in shopping the 'Zon. Smoked octopus anyone?

On The Small Annoyances In Life
I just ordered a canister for my coffee from Amazon. This one. For years I've been using a Gevalia canister I got from them as a promotion to sign up for their 'coffee of the month' club. It's done yeoman duty for those years yet today as I'm flipping it open, the bail that holds the lid down comes off. Right into the pan of sausages as it turns out but I cook those low and slow so it wasn't like I deep fried the thing. The fault, as I examined it, lay in the pin that holds the bail to the ring around the body of the canister. It looks like a long rivet that has lost the flange on one end.
I put it back together but it's now compromised and fatally flawed. Add in that the square base of the canister has never bee my favorite design (coffee gets trapped in the corners) and it became time to acquire a new one. Since I'm all about the stainless steel in the kitchen (wantwantwant a nice stainless fridge but not about to drop the ready on that when the current model is functioning perfectly), I figured that one from Amazon seemed a reasonable bet. From the customer comments I can see that I'll probably have to tack the gasket down and hope the thing holds enough which, since I usually get 8 oz bags from Boca Java, it probably will.
So why the post title? Well, something like buying a new canister is so monumentally inconsequential that my spending the maybe five minutes it took to buy it seemed, afterward, like a waste of time. Compound that with the fact that I didn't really need to buy it, I could have soldiered on with the old one or even kludged a fix, and I'm left wondering about all the staggering inconsequentialities that mount up to form the bulk of days. It's a metaphor for the human condition is my conclusion. It's disgusting to have to go to the bathroom but think what would happen if you didn't. Your life is made better by a process of elimination.
Sometimes a sawbuck for a kitchen gewgaw is a crack in the sidewalk that trips you as you pass. But that stumble may give you a moment to reflect and give you a grip on your basic human condition. It's a mitzvah if you make it so.

I Tend To Do Things That Don't Make Sense
Especially when it comes to ordering online. I really don't like to pay for shipping. I'll go through contortions to avoid shipping charges. Case in point is my first purchase from drugstore.com. I prefer one particular brand of cheap bar soap. Which is not carried at Costco and is no longer carried by my local grocery store. So I checked the 'Zon. They have it but the "prime eligible" "free" shipping soap cluster was about three times the price of a similar cluster from drugstore.com and, my first order, if I bumped it up to $25 gets shipped free.
You know what that meant. I then spent about half an hour trying to track something, anything to add to a couple of soaps. Men's scents? Nothing I like (dang! no Cool Water? no Fahrenheit?) Well, I do need some lip balm. I now have a free-shipping package consisting of nothing but soap and lip balm headed my way. At least I'll have enough Blistex to put in every room in the house and in the car. Saves wear and tear on the pocket. Yeah. Like that's the reason why.

It's All About The Bass
Them low frequency vibes that is, not the fish. Though I have great appreciation for the fish too. I listen to a lot of my music off the computer as the subwoofer gives it a fullness that's rich and buttery. And though I've always liked Apple's earbuds for listening to the various iPods, I miss some of that rumble in the belly that a good bass response gives.
Luckily for me, the good folks at Amazon put these V-MODA Bass Freq Earbuds on sale cheaply enough that I went for it. Yeah. Nice. Of course there's no bass rumble to shake the digestive juices but there's definitely more thump! in the ear. There are little silicon sleeves around the earbud "speakers" that pretty much seal the ear for the sound. I don't know if that's essential to the sound but if i wanted to put in the 'buds to close out the world, these are the thing. I tried it on my test platform which is Donald Fagen's "What I Do" from the "Morph the Cat" disc. (polite golf applause) That'll do nicely. With, of course, the exception of the Nano which needs the control-chipped earbuds. I can make some sacrifices.
IN OTHER NEWS: I'm thinking of making this Celtic Woman disc as my addition to the Christmas music this year. Anyone care to disabuse me of the notion?

Why Am I Not Rich?
Because, if I were, I would be wasting my assets on a self- build P-38 Lightning replica. I have always harbored the desire to build a kit plane but the idea of building my own scaled-down P-38 is just so perfectly insane that I fall in love with the world that offers us humans such things all over again.
Of course I would also have to find Lycurgus a ranch with a landing strip so we could do fly-ins. Yeah. I so would.

Wondering At Its Cosmic Significance
I'm aging. You'd think that such a basic fact would be evident from, oh, about the time rational thought began to arc between neurons in my young cerebroverse. But such a fact is easily ignored as one "develops." Grows up. Aging then is good. "I can drink when I'm how old then? But I can drive now, right? Good enough."
I'm not past my unsell-by date (it's a Brit term, you can figure it out) but the process is having effects that bother and, quite frankly, annoy me. Specifically, my vision is not what it once was. Of course, in a number of ways my vision is never what it once was but that's a philosophical question I'd rather not think about (fingers in ears, "La La La"). I need more light to read now than I did before. I recently went to dinner with a friend and in the ambient light I could hardly make out the menu. Holding up the tealight candle to the menu is ... inelegant.
So I've decided that I need one of those little keychain LED lights which I seem to recall paying about a sawbuck for the last time I got one. Resorting, of course, to Amazon, I found these: a five pack of the little goobers for $7.00 and free shipping. Maybe they're just gawd-awful crappy but there's something encouraging about facing advance and decline and, in dealing with it, finding a surprising bargain.
Life, which sucks, is good. As long as you can find the good.

This Whole World Is Magic!
I just ordered octopus from Amazon.com. It's sold tinned, not fresh of course, but still .... I can sit in a seat that's the equivalent in comfort of any in my house and drive through a pestering rain on the New Jersey Turnpike at 70 miles an hour in perfectly dry comfort. I can sit in a somewhat less comfortable seat in an airplane and thanks to the partial vacuum formed over the wings of the plane be pulled 30,000 feet into the sky where I'll travel at more than four times the speed I can drive anywhere in the world.
Yeah, there are problems in the world. We have a boob for a president and mental midget Islamists want to kill the infidel (Can you just kill the Fidel? We'll be OK with that.) But I can sit at my desk and order tinned octopus which will be delivered to my door. Sweet.

Hole Lee Cow!
New hardware from the Apple Mothership. New iMac (did I buy too soon? of course) and something I just might have to get - a multi-touch capable "Magic Mouse." No more cleaning of a scroll ball ever. Nice. And multi-touch capable! Dang Steve, that rocks.
And a 27 inch iMac with more than 1080p definition? More than HD? Build a TV tuner into that bad boy and ... forget I said that. I didn't say that. You didn't read that.

I M F N Nutz
My morning coffee is shortly about to become a whole new experience. Why? The Technivorm Moccamaster KBT-741. Indulgence ranges from transcendent to ugly. In this instance it could very well be both. Of course I've been wanting one of these since "Cook's Illustrated" informed me of its existence. Them recipe-writin' butter-mongers keep doing this to me!
Yeah. It's their fault.

I Loves Me Some Bamboo
I just added a couple of new pillows to the inventory of the Arx. I had the hideous revelation that two of the pillows I've had on the bed are really no more than half a pillow's worth of feathers. I was even using a folded up mattress pad to bulk up the pillow stack. Absurd. So I stuffed one of the half pillows into the pillowcase of the other half pillow and got the mattress pad the hell off the head of the bed.
Of course all this is driven by my good, good friends at Amazon.com who have become quite expert at separating me from my gelt. They offered a two-pillow set of gel-filled pillows at a price I could not pass up. Gel filled? I hear you say. Yes, so it seems. They feel no different from other, non-down filled pillows I've had in the past. I'll see how they hold up over time. Probably better than down-filled ones when it comes time to launder them.
It's laundry that concerns me of course. There may be a pillow in my house that has not seen the inside of my washing machine but I doubt it. Pillows are truly remarkable collectors of facial oil yellowing. Epic collectors. Even though they can be cleaned, it behooves one (your assignment is use "behooves" in conversation on Friday) to put pillows first in "protectors" and then into pillow cases. So, what does this have to do with bamboo?
I shopped my local Bed, Bath & Beyond (over priced but a really, really great place to shop for the kitchenly-inclined and use the coupons!) for protectors and cases. I found that pillowcases made of bamboo fabric were on sale. I know bamboo is used to make fabric but now I get to put the grassy cloth to the acid test. Oh yeah, they are green. I'm all about the green.

Git Yo Grub On (Cheap Eats Redux)
If you recall my post about gift certificates from Restaurant.com, the sale on the certificates is even better: 90% off through Saturday. (found via Dealhack.com.) That means $25 certificates for a single buck. Worth a flier if you ask me.

Self Knowledge
I am extremely lactose intolerant.
I don't have any deleterious physical effects; I am just totally unwilling to put up with its shenanigans.

ALSO: I've long thought the "flowering teas" in a clear glass pot were particularly attractive and since Amazon saw fit to put one up for sale, I bit the bullet. Pretty, no?
I hope it tastes good.

Do You Eat Out?
Watch it! I mean do you patronize restaurants? If so, you might want to look at Restaurant.com for some deals on meals. The gig is that you buy "gift certificates" which come with some restrictions - notably that you can only use (I'll take as an example a sushi restaurant in my neighborhood - Aoba Sushi) say, a $25 certificate when you spend $35. And the certificate itself costs $10. So you would be getting a discount of $15 which is still a good deal.
Here's the reason for the post today - if you buy yourself some certificates today (the last day of the offer) and enter the code "TASTE" in the coupon code box, you get an 80% discount on the certificates. Thus a $25 certificate (priced at $10) would cost you $2 making the projected $35 meal cost you a total of $12. Deal. I ordered a few for a local place to which I have not been yet so I get to try it out for not a helluva a lot of money.
You can sort restaurants by zip code and I'd like to point out to my co-blogger the Enigmatic misanthrope that his favorite hangout, the Backdoor Bar and Grill offers certificates. Enh? Enh?

Stuff! And, Surprisingly, Not From Amazon
OK, I have been shopping at the 'Zon. Coconut oil for popping popcorn, hemp protein shakes ("organic HempShake" in "berry pomegranate" which sounds rather delicious). But I have some friends who live in the wilds of Western Maryland who are afflicted with pests. So I've just ordered myself an air rifle: 1,200 fps, .177 pellets. I e-mailed an internet friend about the appropriateness of said combination to the problem at hand to which he replied "Oh HELL yes. Keep the range down below 25 yards and do your part, and the pellet will do its."
And it can work on skwerls too. Not in my neighborhood of houses cheek by jowl but there are other places to acquire the makin's for a nice Brunswick stew. I may report on the effects of the rig but it may be the better part of valor to just let the subject drop than befoul your imagination with any stories of the pluck required to hunt successfully.

Stuff Update
Today I peeled stickers off the new sheet pans and washed them. Does not one always wash kitchen apparatus when it comes into the house for the first time? It's not like there was a tag that said "Loving hand crafted for you by the lepers of the Molokai colony," but it seems common sensical to me. Now washing a pan is really not noteworthy save that I mentioned them earlier and now, having actively handled them I now have to say, these things even feel good. Smooth, beautifully machined, not heavy but substantial in one's hand. They exude the feel of sturdy. When Lycurgus inherits my worldly goods, I hope he keeps the sheet pans. They're good.
Also, took advantage of an Amazon "Gold Box" deal to get a battery-powered string trimmer. I have a really nice Black & Decker electric string trimmer but dealing with the cord is a real pain. Now, I'll be able to grab a non-bound-to-the-wall device and whack down the growth at a moment's notice. The fargin' homeowner's association should be pleased. Oh, the new one is another B&D device. They make good tools.

New Stuff
My continuing quest to drain Amazon.com of all its goods continues apace. This week's edition: kitchen stuff. To wit: two half sheet pans. One sold by ReStockIt for about half the cost of the other from Next Day Gourmet. They are nominally not the same size which may be a plus as they nest together perfectly. They are also not nominally the same gauge but I recall that the shipping invoices (which I don't have in front of me) actually have them both as 13 gauge. The significant difference on first inspection is that the more expensive pan has its edge completely rolled over on itself. I can see that this will make a stronger pan. But I felt compelled to follow the dictum of my dear, departed father who said more than once, "If one is good, two are better." He wasn't a cook but he liked gadgets. Very much a guy that way.
All that being said, and I add at this point that up to this point I have had no cookie sheets on which to .... I was going to say "bake cookies" but it seemed too easy.
If anyone wonders why I opt for sheet pans instead of cookie sheets per se, I point the finger in the direction of the great Cook's Illustrated magazine which has determined that sheet pans are superior in performance to thin, warping cookie sheets. When the weather starts to chill down and I'm not running the AC, I'll start baking cookies of many kinds and really put that to the test. I remember my mother making an oatmeal raisin cookie which was mixed together in a Tupperware cake holder (upside down) as the mix had to absorb the oil that was used before the cookies could be made. I'd love to find that recipe in the mass of kitchen papers. And in later years we got a recipe for hermit cookies from a family friend. The link goes to recipes but I don't vouch for them; they're by way of illustration. I do believe that the hermits took first place in my cookie pantheon. I'm sure that recipe is in the stack. Definitely going to make those.
Oh, I also got a wire rack insert for the half sheet pan. It seems just so like something I've seen Alton Brown use on "Good Eats." How could I resist?
UPDATE: Please don't miss the potato chip cookie recipe in the comments. I realize my mistake in assaying anything about baking in the ken of the XMBD NMSE who, along with her mother are two of the world's finest non-professional bakers. But I am not such an old dog that I can't learn some new tricks.

What? No Posting?
Yeah, yeah. My picture is in the dictionary(.com) under "slack." But I've been Mr. Homebody lately. My deskal area is in the process of a massive re-build (which, by the way, will leave an LCD monitor/flat screen desk-mounted "arm" available if anyone is interested) which will result in increased usable space and less reason to mess about stacking up piles and piles of paper.
I'm going to take some pictures of my Aero-Garden herbs this after noon and post them. I've got to say, those things work rather startlingly well. I've got the "herb" collection (no, not "herb," - herbs) with parsley, dill, basil, purple basil thyme and mint. The basil and dill are really going to town. But, as I said, I'll post pics.
Otherwise, perhaps it's a weather thing for me but Saturday was just hell on my joints. Every single one of them ached. Not just the usual suspects, all the residents of Osteotown. At least today is not so bad. It's wet here but much cooler. So today I should be able to, oh, say, complete the desk rebuild. Have a nice brunchish sit down with the newspaper and a good pot of coffee. Shop Costco for the necessaries. (Oh, speaking of shopping - Today's Woot is a kitchen scale for $25 including shipping. It has a 4.5 star rating on Amazon with 14 customer reviews at a cost of $45. Yes, I ordered one.)
Also, the blogroll update continues. I've moved two from the "Links" level to the "In Memoriam" level. Keep in mind that "In Memoriam" can refer to a blogger whose joined the Choir Eternal or one who's just stopped posting. By the way something, if you live in Maryland and have a pug named "Petey," you need to e-mail me. My last message to you bounced back.
I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday. I will do my best to get pictures posted this after noon.

What Do You Think?
I just ordered one of these toaster ovens from the nice people at Amazon. My old, and by old I mean I really don't remember when I bought it, toaster oven still works but it's no longer what I want in a countertop appliance. It came with an aluminum tray which I hate, hate, hate. I could get a stainless steel tray really, truly, honest-to-goodness clean. I could use oven cleaner on it. Not so with aluminum.
So I bought some after-market toaster oven accessories, non-stick even. And they were superior but the muffin pan did not fit! It was too wide. I even considered hacking the "ears" off the pan. But rather than cookware surgery, I realized that I really wanted a bigger, more functional toaster oven than the one I'd been using lo! these several years. Now, I'm expecting the new one on Wednesday which means I'll have to care fully clean the old one (I've done that before!) and then donate it to some deserving outfit.
I'd be interested to know what you, dear reader, think about my new toaster oven. It's something I've been turning over in my mind for probably the last four months and I'm hoping that I made the right choice.
Also, I should be getting the new Basia disc, another home appliance from Amazon and part of an order from Costco today. My UPS guy brings me the coolest stuff! Then some other SOB makes me pay for it. Dagnabbit!

Holy ... OK Then: Wow!
Apple has just released the new iMac line. Beautiful stuff. Single sheet aluminum body, speed, memory and drive size bumps all around. One can now get a 24 inch iMac with a 2.66 GHz processor and a 640 GB hard drive for $1500. That is one hell of a machine for a price unseen previously.
And that's even mentioning all the built-in doodads like the iSight camera and the way-cool application suite that comes with the latest iteration of OS X.
Sweet.

Coffee Blogging
Haven't done any coffee blogging in a while. And my mind lately has been all over the Technivorm Moccamaster KBT-741 out of Holland. It's not cheap at $265 (and seems to be getting progressively more expensive as I've tracked it over time). "Cook's Illustrated" had this to say about it:

In the end, only one coffee maker stood out in our tests as exceptional. The Technivorm Moccamaster (model KBT741), made in the Netherlands, consistently brewed smooth, full-flavored coffee that our tasters rated highest. Tellingly, it was the only model to get close to the ideal six-minute brewing time, averaging 7½ minutes to completely finish dripping, though the water was fully dispensed within six minutes. Unlike any of the other coffee makers, its internal heating element brought the brewing water to the correct temperature range within seconds and kept it there through the brewing cycle.
It turns out that in contrast to most coffee maker heating elements, which are made of aluminum, the Technivorm's heating element is made of far more expensive copper. In coffee makers, the heating element usually runs alongside a tube containing water. As the cool water drips down from the tank, it passes through the heated channel, then boils up to the top of the machine, and finally drips down onto the grounds. A copper heating element has higher thermal conductivity than aluminum, meaning it is more responsive and can reach a higher temperature more quickly. The Technivorm is also more powerful, operating at a higher electrical wattage than most coffee makers - with 1,400 watts compared to the average 900 watts of the rest of the lineup - making its brew time correspondingly more efficient.

Of course I wonder whether putting a 1400 watt appliance on the circuit shared by my microwave might be problematic (don't nuke while you brew I hear you say - one does not always remember these things!) And a friend of mine just repaid a small loan I made to him so I'm sitting on the cash to get one ... but no. Gotta hold onto them greenbacks until the economy starts improving. I am, however, going to get one of these firstest when I get my mitts on some real cash.
I'd love to hear if anyone else has some bitchin' brewing equipment that they'd recommend. Comments please.