I have a good number of one-pot soups/stews that I am excited to get back to cooking again, now that it is FINALLY CHILLY YAY!

Black bean soup (add sausage if you're not veggie), chili in several forms, a wonderful vegetarian chili-ish thing with barley and black beans, assorted Indian dishes, a lot of sort of 'creative' things from The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home that sound a little weird but are actually good. We make a cooking list for the week when we grocery shop, but don't determine days for the cooking; that's the next step, but we aren't that organized. I always pack a lunch, and in winter it's usually leftovers; we don't often end up freezing stuff since there are 4 of us and I eat leftovers for lunch.

My mother has a Costco membership, and when she visits we've bought things like mega sacks of pistachios, olive oil, multi-packs of the kind of pasta sauce we use, Quik, freezable fancy sausages (chicken with feta and spinach, yum!). My rule is to not buy anything we wouldn't ordinarily eat anyway.

The $3 bread machine I picked up at a PA thriftstore turns out to work after all (it was in seriously never-used condition) and has produced a small loaf of bread. Plus, although the bread pan is really kind of teensy, because the loaf is so small, it bakes up in 2:20! I foresee all sorts of bready-treats this winter.

I could only wish to be so organized that I could shop for meat and so on, but seriously, I have a small-enough number of commercially produced products I can buy, anyway, because of my bizarro dietary restrictions. When and if Whole Foods starts up a WF Club (which, really, Trader Joe's already IS) I'll be there.

ugh - house centipede going up the bedroom wall. I know they are harmless and eat other yucky bugs like roaches, but I have to kill them when I see them.

FNL - Tammy was breaking my heart, I can kinda see her not calling any of the "bookclub women", who are really all we have seen her sociallize with, depending on show late it was, knowing how judgy/gossipy they are. And they have only been in Dillion a year, we lived in a small TX town for 10 years and no way my mom had close ties in that first year - I think she and dad had 2-3 dinner invites the whole time we were there. I can't feel sorry for Buddy. He is such a ginormous ass. I feel bad for him and his family - the scene was hard to watch, but ASS. I might actually be starting to dislike Taylor child more than Lila, and I did not think I could dislike anyone more than Lila (of the kids). I am still bothered by a lack of catch-up on Tim and Smash expaling what happened between end of last season and this one. It seems odd to protray Tim as sober at the party last night, since they had pretty much reverted to early season 1 Tim, and he would never NOT be drinking .

Last night I was walking home, I saw a refrigerator that someone was throwing out. The freezer was one solid block of ice -- with a carton of Häagen Dazs sticking out of it.

Clearly a guy.

I got a costco membership desptie being single and having no car. Because I got a thing in the mail that offered me a $25 gift card when I joined. I figured a $30 membership ($55 membership minus the $25 gift card.) was worth it for a year, even if I just buy kitty litter.

On my first trip, megan and I learned, never go to costco on Saturday.

That's a hard way to learn!

Gronk. Have so much to do before Ellen gets here. I was just so wrecked yesterday I couldn't do a thing.

I got a free Costco membership (for about 1/4 year) a while back, and although Flatmate-at-the-Time and I went, we were pretty restrained in what we bought. The funny part about wandering the store is recognizing that, although the sales are name-brands, and they're in really big bins, not all of the prices are cheaper per unit than they would be in the grocery store. (Some are, but a lot of them aren't.)

It takes a nerd to save at Costco. If you just buy the bulk without regard to per-unit price, then you're probably a family of 12, or somebody who really really wants to stay away from grocery stores.

In re FNL, I think it is not spoilery to say that fully 3/4 of the speaking cast that plays footballers is shorter than Coach Taylor. Who isn't itty bitty, but, IRL he is too small to play Div I football for sure. His players are smaller than him. He's easily got 3-4 inches (and probably 30-40 lb.) on Saracen, e.g.

I think smaller actors -- and certainly skinnier actors -- create a more effective impression of youth, so that meant they could cast a bunch of early-20s guys with experience rather than an actual highschool class. Unfortunately, I think The Rock could totally wipe the floor with the entire Dillon High football team, and that I would pay to watch that.

(I mean, inasmuch as I would pay to watch The Rock chew popcorn.)

Sigh. Salon has an article [link] arguing against the electoral college. And while there are plenty of good arguments against the electoral college, "It gives disproportionate power to voters in small states" is not one of them. Mathematically, it doesn't work out that way. (Basically, North Dakota has more electoral votes per citizen than Florida does, but Florida's got a much bigger chance of deciding the national election, while in most elections, it's completely irrelevant which way North Dakota goes -- there are very very few elections decided by three electoral votes.)

(That's the traditional analysis. My issue with that analysis is that all the calculations are based on the assumption that Democratic and Republican voters are distributed evenly across the country. I'm almost certain that if you took into account percentages on how each state tends to vote, you'd end up that the voters with the most power are the ones in Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and other states like that -- states with relatively big populations that ALSO tend to have pretty close elections. I tried running some test numbers on that a few years ago, and it seemed to work out the way I expected, but I never really looked into it further.)