1. This morning I leapt into the Sube and screeched uptown to the clinic and had blood drawn so we can see how my kidneys are functioning. I continue to feel great. I continue not to experience the symptoms of kidney disease. I hope there's a connection between how I feel and what the numbers say about my kidney function. I hope the numbers are as stable as my general feeling of well-being continues to be.
2. When we left Greenbelt to move to Kellogg, we gave away a lot of things: furnishings, appliances, books, and more, including our electric frying pan (we also gave one away when we moved from Eugene to Greenbelt). I haven't bought another here in Kellogg because our storage space for kitchen appliances is limited and I prefer not to have more kitchenware than the kitchen, with help from the basement, can readily contain.
A while back, I mistakenly bought a Dutch oven larger than the two we already owned. My plan had been to replace the larger of the two with this new one, but we decided to keep all three. We use Dutch ovens a lot and the new one did not present a storage problem.
So, early this afternoon I assumed the pose of Rodin's "The Thinker" and contemplated what I might fix for Debbie and me for dinner.
I had a flashback to the days in Eugene and Greenbelt of the electric frying pan.
I used to enjoy combining bacon and ground beef with a variety of vegetables, fry them up, and spice this mess of food up with some Frank's Original Hot Sauce.
Then a possibility popped in my head.
I could use the larger Dutch oven in a way similar to how I used to use the electric fry pan.
After a trip to Yoke's, I chopped up some bacon and put it in the larger Dutch oven along with ground beef. I chopped up onion and sweet red pepper. I had chopped mushrooms on hand as well as frozen sweet corn and frozen green beans.
The ground beef browned more quickly than the bacon cooked up, so I removed the bacon bits and continued to fry them in the cast iron skillet. I added the onion, pepper, mushrooms, corn, and green beans to the browned ground beed and later added the more fully fried bacon.
While these things all cooked away, I made a pot of jasmine rice.
When the rice was done it so happened that the vegetables were also tender and I added rice to the ground beef/bacon/vegetable combination and that was our dinner tonight.
Debbie seasoned her bowl of food with green salsa. I opted for Bragg Liquid Amino.
It all worked out great.
3. Debbie and I finished listening to all 8.5 episodes of Burn Wild and agreed it would be fun to listen to another podcast that would add to our knowledge about the world.
We agreed to give Rachel Maddow's podcast, Ultra, a try. A couple years ago we had listened to her podcast on the downfall of Spiro Agnew entitled Bag Man, found it compelling, and decided to listen to this new one.
Neither of us knew what to expect. Almost immediately, we learned that this podcast, though careful documentation and interviews with historians, would, at least in its early episodes, be looking back at pro-Hitler, Fascist activity in the United States, both inside Congress and in a variety of US cities and communities.
We've learned a lot in the four and a half episodes we listened to about bombing campaigns in the USA, propaganda campaigns, and how German Nazis had become directly involved with certain very willing members of the US House and Senate.
If you'd like to check out this podcast, all the episodes are available right here.
POSTSCRIPT: I enjoyed listening to this podcast with Debbie, but it meant that I missed a lot of nail-biting action in college basketball -- I'm thinking of UCLA/USC, Zags/USF, and Iowa/Indiana. And, UW gave UA a tussle, as best I can tell.
I can't do everything.
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