in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia

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erisender:

my birthday cake this year. based off of this text post

Ooh, a loophole for never-having-been-born curses!

Tags:

#pregnancy #birthday #removal day #about once a year #(at irregular intervals) #Mom tells the story of how her doctors pressured her into an unnecessary C-section #and she’s still mad at them for it #but to be fair if they’d waited for me to come out on my own I’d have almost certainly been a Sagittarius #and that would have gone *badly* #The Great Night Vale Fandom Assimilation of 2013 #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #(also my birthday would have been firmly within the Christmas season and that would suck too)

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colchrishadfield:

For fun this Canada Day, my brother and I set out to make the most Canadian music video ever. How’d we do?

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #music #good old Chris Hadfield #my family doesn’t own any Canadian Tire money #though we do have a Tim Hortons donut hole #(…we’ve had that donut hole since our Yay Citizenship party two months ago) #(we really should get rid of it) #(but *not* on a day of the week where it would fall to me to wash the container we put it in) #(if Mom really wants to keep that disposable container she can wash it herself)

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slepaulica asked: is there a way i could have tagged that post that would have helped? i covered the options i could think of but if you have something in specific saviored i can try to use that in the future

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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I don’t have anything relevant saviored. You’d be surprised how rarely it comes up*, and when it does it’s usually people talking about how ill they are under readmores (so I don’t need an add-on to let me skip it). And like I said, all in all I’m glad for the warning.

*On the Internet, I mean. It comes up a lot when grocery shopping and suchlike. (Did you know Canada doesn’t have a consistent date-writing method? Good luck figuring out whether a bar of Cracker Barrel labelled “14 DE 13” is still good. (It is. Cracker Barrel writes the year first. But you can’t generalise that to non-Cracker-Barrel products.))

 

{{Looks like the linked post has been access-locked, so here is my comment from it:

“You can never have enough pi. There’s always some digits you’re missing.

Besides, Canada doesn’t have a single standard date-writing method. The closest we’ve got is 2013 MR* 14, but a lot of things don’t use it. (Say you have a box of crackers. The current date is October 20th, 2012, your phobia of rotting food prevents you from eating only-just-expired crackers but you have a friend nearby who will eat them, and the expiration date on the box is “11/10/12”. What should you do with it? The correct answer is “It is impossible to say without more information on how this particular brand of crackers writes their dates.”)

*Every month-word shares at least two letters in English and French. Many share more (there’s not really a significant difference between “November” and “novembre”), and if you saw a date written “2013 Fev 03″ you could almost certainly guess what it meant even if the third letter isn’t quite right. But two letters means it can be completely consistently written.”}}

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #I hardly ever eat strawberries anyway #I got a rash after eating strawberry baby food #so I spent like fifteen years thinking I was allergic #and when I got up the nerve to try them I found them a bit of a let-down #too crunchy #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

slepaulica:

feliscorvus:

ajax-daughter-of-telamon:

Scary bugs hiding in fruit is a thing that worried me a lot as a child, because my family had a grapevine and my mom told me once that I had to be careful it I was going to pick any of the grapes and eat them, BECAUSE THERE COULD BE BEES IN THEM.

Yeah, guess who never picked another grape ever again, LOL.

I am generally compelled to cut strawberries in half before eating them, given that I did actually find a worm of some sort living in the middle of one a few years ago!

i have to look for holes in cherries, because if there are little holes in them there are little worms in them too.

It’s always been the possibility of moldy/rotting fruit that worried me (though I do check down the middle of raspberries for bugs), but I think I’ll have to start cutting strawberries open.

Tags:

#bugs #bees #food #worms #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #and while slightly annoyed at having a new reason for manifestation of this #is mostly glad not to have found out about wormy strawberries the hard way

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(sort-of-tagged by eponymous-rose)

1. What’s the weirdest thing you did as a child?

That’s the sort of question where you just know you’re going to think of something weirder ten minutes after you hit “post”, but I’ll try.

I used to collect coupons. I didn’t use them, just collected them. I would carefully cut them out, trimming off the dotted lines around the edges while leaving the bar codes and fine print intact (this sometimes required curving the cut, but I tried very hard not to do that). I kept them in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

2. Five things you love about you!

a. I managed to learn how to type 80wpm without looking at the keyboard, despite never putting any effort into it. (Well, I played a little Typer Shark as a kid, but not that much, and I never took a class on touch-typing or anything like that.)

b. I can be very persevering when other people are counting on me.

c. I’m very good at checking expiration dates. I once looked at a juice box’s jumble of alphanumeric code (a code Mom had found impenetrable) and discerned the expiration date at a glance without having to search for it. (Silver lining of a food poisoning phobia.) Back when Canadian Goldfish bags only had production codes and no expiration dates, I even learned how to calculate the expiration date using the production code. (I determined the shelf life by examining an American Goldfish bag, which had both.)

d. My introspectiveness. I like that I can untangle at least some of the layers of weird in my brain, especially when it leads me to practical implications. (How many books of a series do you need to binge on in order to induce perseveration?* Does caffeine act as a short-term libido suppressant?**)

*Four.

**I haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but I have every indication it ought to work. (I suppose I ought to do the test properly, with blinding. Mind you, even a placebo would be useful. It would be nice, about halfway through the 4 – 5 days of post-ovulation tiredness, to have a bit of a break.)

e. I have a pretty good body. Not a beautiful body, which I gather is what people tend to mean when they call a body “good”. (It looks plain, which is exactly how I like it.) Rather, it’s comfortable to live in.

3. Where is the one place you feel most at peace?

Floating in my bathtub. Unfortunately, I am now too tall to float in my bathtub. I’m pretty sure my quality of life noticeably decreased when that happened.

4. Do you have any summer plans?

Learning about geology and computer programming. The last ten days of May are the closest thing I’m getting to a summer break. (I am so taking December off.)

5. What is the most expensive thing you’ve ever purchased?

University education. Those two courses in question 4 alone cost me $1600, and that’s with Canadian subsidising. (Regarding the usual things: I’ve never bought a house or vehicle, and all of my computers over the years have cost less than $500 each, which is probably why they’ve been so crappy.)

(Well, I think part of why this computer is so crappy is because it’s lived too long. When I first bought it it was a five-year-old model: old, but young enough for developers to generally acknowledge that people are going to try to use their products on it. Now it’s an eight-year-old model, and nobody accounts for the possibility of eight-year-old computers. It would be too impractical.)

6. What is your sleep schedule like, if you have one?

I’ve found myself drifting back and sleeping less during my break from school, which probably says a lot about me. Right now it’s about 11:45 PM – 8:30 AM, give or take fifteen minutes on each. It’ll probably return to 12 – 9:10 once I start school again.

7. If you could relive one moment of your life, what would it be?

Well, my favourite memory is probably the time I went out dolphin-watching in the Atlantic (off Cape May) when I was about eleven or twelve. I felt…what do you call the opposite of sea-sickness? Sea-wellness, I suppose. The rocking of the boat made me euphoric rather than nauseated. And though I was having fun, time did not fly. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every second of those two hours.

The nice thing about having a favourite memory like that is that I might well be able to do something like it again.

(We did see dolphins, but as far as I’m concerned they were just a bonus.)

8. Do you have any secret talents? If so, what?

If I told you, they wouldn’t be secret anymore, would they.

(I suppose you could count some of the things in the “five things I love about me”.)

9. What do you hope gets invented before you die?

I have to agree with Rose on this one and say immortality. Failing that, a sufficiently effective and reliable treatment for Alzheimer’s soon enough that I need never worry about getting it myself. (An outright cure or a thyroid/HIV-style “you’ll be fine as long as you take your meds, but you can never go off them without becoming symptomatic”, either way.)

10. If you could have a super power, what would it be?

Wolverine-level healing factor (see also question 9). If it were only a milder healing factor on offer (does not extend lifespan, fatal injuries will still kill you), I’d probably rather go for unbreathing (in the Nethack sense), despite the potential for annoying side effects regarding consensual inhalant drugs. The number of water sports that I have seen people play on Daily Planet and thought “I would love to do that, if only I were immune to drowning”…

11. They say a friend will help you move and a best friend will help you move a body. Do you have a best friend?

I don’t think I know anyone who cares more about me than they care about not being an accomplice to murder/not allowing a murderer to go free. That’s probably for the best.

If we take a broader interpretation of “body”, I expect Mom, Brother, and possibly Dad would assist me in being someone’s caretaker (which would likely involve moving their body at some point). Not sure about non-relatives.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #(you may have noticed I talked about tiredness and heightened sex drive as if they were the same thing) #(that is because they are) #(and let me tell you once you figure *that* out there are all *kinds* of practical implications) #(caffeine is just the first one that came to mind) #meme #Possible TMI #you can be sort-of-tagged too if you like

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

orangewave:

getting real damn tired of having people yelling “LO OL WTF ARE MILK BAGS LOL” 

 

mediocre-misadventures:

This is disgusting and you should be ashamed.

 

orangewave:

calm down friend jesus christ there is nothing wrong with it, it saves space and it produces less garbage and is easy to recycle

 

grouchythefish:

you do have a pretty ugly milk jug tho

 

izzy-sukeban-jones:

if you cut the tip off, how do you seal it when you save it for later?

 

bakamic:

^^^ Seriously. How do you store it after you open it?

 

orangewave:

Step one: step two: 

 

note-a-bear:

This is still a problem, because if you don’t have a cover for that jug, your milk’s gonna get all kinds of funky smells.

If you’re gonna use bags for milk, why not do the bags with spouts that soda machines use for soda???

Like, a spout just saves so much needless stress.

 

blue-author:

No, this is part of the “less waste” thing. If you can taste every single thing you’ve got in your fridge whenever you take a drink of milk, then you won’t have to use a piece of paper to write a shopping list.

 

slepaulica:

just buy the half litre bags and drink it out of the bag. that’s what i do.

Less waste? Bagged milk causes more waste. It’s a waste of plastic (unless you can recycle the inner bags and just nobody told me, in which case it’d be no more or less a waste than cartons and jugs*), and it’s a waste of milk. Bagged milk (even unopened) goes bad much faster than milk in cartons or jugs (even opened). The milk manufacturers will tell you it lasts just as long, but they are lying. (Do not buy bagged milk with less than a week left before its sell-by date, and exercise extreme caution when drinking it: it will probably have gone bad already.)

(The really weird part is the financial incentive for consumers to use this plastic-and-milk-wasting method. 4L of bagged milk costs only slightly more (absolute, not per-litre) than 2L of carton. I have sometimes seen (not on sale) 4L of bagged milk for two cents less than one 2L carton. Therefore, per litre-actually-drunk, buying a 3-pack of bags and throwing one of them away is cheaper than buying a 2L carton and finishing it.)

*They do not have plastic gallon jugs in Canada, as far I can tell. I miss jugs.

Tags:

#food #our home and cherished land #the dark side of bulk discounts #especially ridiculously large ones #up with jugs #I don’t think we have half-litre bags here #just four-thirds litre bags #and only in 3-packs #my bag of milk tasted funny yesterday in the way it does the day before it goes lumpy #so I expect I will have to throw it away today #we managed about 2.5 bags this time #not bad relatively speaking #(sometimes) #(if my brother and I are sufficiently diligent in our milk-drinking) #(we can even finish all three) #(those are good times) #(non-guilty times)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

uispeccoll:

gov-info:

Smithsonian Gov Doc: Archives…In Bed

In 2010, Fortune Cookie Chronicles author Merlin Lowe donated a 60-year can of “tea cakes,” along with a baker’s hat, to the National Museum of American History. For three years at the museum, the can remained unopened and the question lingered: what is inside a can of Hong Kong Tea Cakes from the 1930s?! This was the mystery finally solved in the conservation lab…. MORE

I am a sucker for any story about actual food in collections. Auto REBLOG!!

Tags:

#60-year-old fortune cookies #that look totally normal #I can feel ‘this is disturbing’ and ‘this is cool!’ fighting for dominance in my brain #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia

We Are Magneton: bravelittlehobbitwhomwealladmire: tyrotheterrible replied to your…

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bravelittlehobbitwhomwealladmire:

tyrotheterrible replied to your post: Now I’m thinking about dairy. I’m not lactose…

OH MY GOD YOU TOO? I thought I was the only one who couldn’t stand the taste of regular milk. Like, even the look of it tweaks my gag reflex. o_o

OHGOD…

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Milk is awesome. Including non-organic non-flavoured 2%. You have to be careful, though, because you can’t trust the milk manufacturers. It used to be the expiration date was a conservative estimate. I’ve had milk that was lumpy four days before the sell-by date. I carefully taste any milk with less than a week left. It’s not paranoia when they’re really out to get you*, as they say.

I wonder if it’s related to the way it’s bagged. They have bagged milk here in Canada. It’s weird. They sell special pitchers to put the milk bags in; you put in the bag, cut off the top-outer corner, and pour. And they don’t have plastic jugs. (They do have those cardboard-ish cartons, though.)

*Did I ever teach you guys how to speak Goldfish?

Tags:

#i have problems you guys   #pm   #reply via reblog