Pumpkin Pancakes
Since somebody chastised me on Twitter (Hi Sara) for mentioning these without giving the recipe, and I been stalling on posting because I really wanted to move away from political posting, I figured I would share what is our typical Sunday Morning breakfast in the Autumn, Pumpkin Pancakes.
Ingredients.
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp nutmeg
- 1 large egg, lightly beaten
- 1 tbsp butter (melted)
- 1 cup nonfat milk
- 1/3 cup pure pumpkin
(Shortcut if you like, or if you have pre-mixed Pumkin Spice in stead of the cinnamon, ginger and Nutmeg)
The good (and important) parts of the bailout
Look, I am not any big fan of bailing out a bunch of Investment Bankers and banks. Fine, I am not a fan of the idea at all. And I am not going to spend too much time on the negatives, the golden parachutes, idiotic CEO pay scales, and the like. These have all been well documented and hammered home on virtually every blog and Tweet on the subject.
However, in all the negativity on the subject, something has gotten lost, and I don’t think (well I know, but I didn’t want to overstate it) many quite understand the gravity of the situation, and why it wasn’t just an “easy” decision for lawmakers to just tell these companies to, “go ahead and fail,” or ”you made your your own bed.” It just isn’t, as much as we would like to think it is, to untie these situations from the rest of the economy because of the scale of it all.
A car dealer not far from my home, Bigelow Motors, had been in business for 66 years. It had weathered upturns and downturns many times over the years, but they were basically forced to close their doors this past week. The reason? They lost their line of credit.
In my own business, there are times that I need credit to cover the time between when I secure the supplies I need and the time my client pays me. Without that line of credit, I am seriously hampered in what I can do and what orders I can complete.
This is a common way of doing business for companies big and small (only the size of the line of credit changes). From small corner delis that need to cover stock to mega corporation deals, there is very little that is done “in cash” because income and outlay do not always line up nice and neatly.
Obviously, the impact on business also affects employment as well. Everybody at that car dealership I mentioned earlier is out looking for a job now. Unemployment is up all over the place, and would only get worse as businesses need to either cut back or shut down because they are not able to conduct business as usual.
So, just understand, it was not a “no-brainer” to just vote this bill down. (Well, it was in that crazy first draft sent over from President Bush, but that was pretty much obvious to everybody except I guess President Bush and Treasury Secretary Pauson). Is it ideal? No. Did it have to be as quickly as it was? Unfortunately, Yes.
While people joke around now about how it hasn’t fixed everything already, this plan it going to take time to actually start having an effect, so even now we are still in crisis, but everyday that it waited is more time until implementation takes effect, and the more business that are apt to fail if this wasn’t passed in some form.
What I think a lot of people are shocked with, it that they got a good look at how Washington works. The sort of wheeling and dealing (and pork additions) that happened here goes on constantly. It is “how things work” and while this is no secret, it was clearly (and expensively) on display here.
I guess what I am trying to say here is, that I am not saying you shouldn’t be angry about what is going on. I sure am. But be angry at the right people, for the right reasons. Look to former Texas Senator Phil Gramm and his slipping in of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) that enabled things like the Enron collapse, and the bundling of “derivatives” that helped make this mortgage crisis possible. Be angry that this same Phill Gramm is on John McCain’s short list to be Treasurer of the United States. Be angry at those that politicized this process and demanded pork for their vote. But don’t take a “yes” vote in and of itself to be the whole reason. This really wasn’t an easy situation for anyone to swallow, and there are valid reasons to have voted for the bailout. The damage has long since been done, and now it needed to be fixed to keep the situation from getting worse.
Getting some perspective
On a day to day basis, people fret over small details. As highlighted by the show Bridezillas, in many cases this gets highlighted (and quite intense) during particularly stressful times (like getting married). We worry about the wrong flowers, or somebody is 5 minutes late.
How would you have liked to have had THIS to be your wedding day?
Just a reminder that no matter how bad something seems… it can almost always be worse.
That time of year
I just need to survive. That is my mantra for the next couple of weeks.
Wenesday, LatteGirl had her first Piano Recital (which went off very well thank you very much).
Tonight, she is “testing” to try and move up to a yellow belt in Karate.
As part of her birthday present LatteGirl wanted her room done over, which is something TheWife has wanted to do for a while anyway, but just to add to the fun, TheWife scheduled that done this week as well. (Please don’t even get me started with the fact that with this make-over things like Winnie the Pooh pictures are on the way out to make room for Hannah Montana posters)
Next week is LatteGirl’s birthday, and dance recital in the same weekend. She follows that with finals. FINALS!?! When they hell did they start having final exams in second grade???
Ah well… sleep is highly overrated anyway.
Exploding Patio Sets?
OK, not really… but now that I have your attention, let me tell you what happened this past weekend. It was Saturday, a relatively warm, cloudy day here in New Jersey. Like every Saturday for the past few months, my routine was the same, I would go out on my back deck, enjoy a cup of coffee and my morning cigarette (yes, I know… don’t go there), the dogs run around the yard, and then I get ready and head off to the gym. So like every other Saturday morning, I knew exactly what the condition of the yard was (mostly I note whether I will be mowing or doing yard work that day). Nothing was particularly amiss or out of the usual.
As I was coming home, TheWife calls me and says the our patio set is “broken” (I really must speak to her about her ability to understate a situation). I arrived home to find that the tempered glass top of our patio set had shattered into nothing but a chards of glass. I mean tiny. The pieces were so small that you could fit two or three of them on a dime. I found this quite baffling. Now granted tempered glass is supposed to break in a way that prevents thos huge sharp edges from forming, but in the past, I had only seen the tiny pieces at point of impact when something broke the glass, and the rest sort of hung together in a “sheet” of broken pieces. In this case the entire tabletop was completely in chards. I did my best Gil Grissom imitation (other than taking photos… dammit), looking for a cause. There were no rocks, sticks, branches from a tree or other projectiles within the rubble. The ring that protects the center hold where the umbrella goes had fallen straight down and landed on the leg of the table, so obviously the table came straight down, and not at some angle. There was no blood to indicate that a squirrel or other animal had landed on it crashing through. I even entertained the notion that since I live in the flight path of Newark Liberty International Airport that it was a case of “blue ice” and that in the midday sun, it had just melted… but even that would have left some sort of residue from the dye (and or contained waste…ewww). No, nothing seemed to fit.
The table, was one I had purchased from K-Mart a couple of years ago, one of their Martha Stewart line of tables. I was talking about it this week to somebody, and decided to look up some information on Tempered Glass, and at first found this article discussing how when tempered glass is compromised in some way that it can seem like it just “explodes.” Back into Google for a search of “Tempered Glass Exploding” and there… the first article up (at least at the time I did the search), was this little piece called, “Sounds of Summer: Martha Stewart Tables Shattering.” Turns out, this “phenomenon” that had struck our table was not at all uncommon.
There is apparently even a class action lawsuit that is in the works against Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia and JRA Funiture. However, JRA Funiture filed Chapter 7 Bakruptcy (total liquidation) last year, so at least they are no longer the source (depending on inventories of course) of the tables, but it also means no recovery for the Class Action Lawsuit either.
I’d like to think that with JRA Funiture out of business that this is the end of the situation, but to be honest, reading how Sears (and/or Kmart) and Martha Stewart Living have not even (so far as I can tell) acknowledged this as a problem, outside of saying they will work with consumers under warranty, leaves me a little ill at ease with them, leaving me doubting whether I want to trust them again. Problem is, at least the old sets were also farmed out under different names to other chains as well. JRA’s funiture was also sold under the Hampton Bay name at Home Depot, as well as being carried by Sam’s Club, Target and Safeway. (Only Home Depot has has a similar report of an exploding table that I have been able to find so far).
If you have (or had) one of these sets, if your table is still under warranty you can call K-mart Customer Service about it at 866-562-7848 (though K-Mart has not specifically said they will honor the manufacturer’s warranty) or Home Depot (who will honor the warranty) at 800-585-9969. Other than that you are probably out of luck. So what does this all mean? I guess, most of all be careful if you are going to buy a glass top patio set from a discount retailer. In my case, I am thinking a nice teak set might be in our future instead of risking it with glass again.
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