Three Beautiful Things 04/15/15: Purchasing Batteries and Updating PayPal, Scan Away, Namya Curry Dinner

1.  I purchased the Deke and me laptop computers at the same time a few years back and now both machines need new batteries.  I stewed over this decision for a couple of days and finally decided to pay extra money and buy from the manufacturer of our computers.  I decided, for no reason other than I hadn't done it for a while, to pay through PayPal and realized it had been about 100 years since I had used my account and everything was out of date -- so buying a couple of batteries got to be even more time consuming as I had to do a million things to get my PayPal account operating again -- ha!  Twice during this purchase ordeal, I needed to get a hold of the manufacturer of our computers and what this is all coming down to is that I am really grateful for the service that allows a customer with questions or concerns to chat online with a service rep.  I have used this chat service several times, very successfully with Norton, and, today, I got my questions answered and a slight problem solved without having to talk on the phone.  That is a bonus for me -- to get information and solve problems in real time without having to be on the phone.  Yes!  And batteries should arrive in the next three days or so.

2.  Having rolled the battery to the top of the hill, I decided it was time to get more of our paper life at home organized. I am ready with the paperwork for my next twelve monthly blood draws, but the big job was scanning and storing our 900,000 pages of tax documents and starting to do a little research regarding how much estimated tax to pay the state of Maryland on my pension earnings. Rock on, ooh my soul.

3.  When I got my echo cardiogram a couple of weeks ago, I also went to Hung Phat grocery and, among other things, bought a curry paste I'd never tried:  Namya.  It's a fish curry paste and its pleasing heat comes late in the sequences of tastes it produces.  I don't know much about Namya curry and was feeling tired and lazy, so rather than look up a recipe, I stir fried tofu, onion, and eggplant and mixed some paste with coconut milk, oyster sauce, and a little sugar.  I combined all of the above and served it over brown rice and it was surprisingly good.  I have work to do in the curry area -- mostly with how thick/thin I want my curry sauces to be, but tonight's experiment made for a pretty good dinner and the Deke will have more at lunch tomorrow.