What's Your Favorite Halloween Candy (Treat?)

I should have said treat because...well... what if you like being mindful of being healthy all year long. You might prefer apples.

My friend, Myra recently sent me a Consumer Reports article about the favorite Halloween treats that the CR staff preferred.

When I was in grade school I know my favorite candy was Hershey's milk chocolate bars.

I used my 10 cent allowance to buy 2 of them and there was no tax added at the candy truck that came by.

Ahhh... those were the days.

I didn't have to worry about my glucose levels then.

However, once I was in college my tastes changed. I think that's when it happened. I switched to loving Snickers.

When our kids were growing up we only bought Snickers for Halloween treats to give out to neighborhood children. We never bought candy corn. Yuck! (Oops! Sorry. That's just me.)

But now... My favorite candy is Kit Kat. I haven't had it in a long time, but it's what I switched to and what I passed out for Halloween when we had kids here (Hawaii) in the neighborhood.

And here's what the Consumer Reports staff reported as their favorite.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? Really?

Art no longer eats candy, but he says his favorite as a child used to be Heath. Heath? Really?

What is/was your favorite candy?

POSTSCRIPT:

Good grief! I was talking to my classmate/childhood companion/friend, Diane about our favorite candy when we were growing up and she reminded me of LOOK! candy. 

How could I forget? Yes! Yes! It's true!

The packaging has changed a lot but  it looks like the candy is almost the same. It was nougat with some bits of peanuts in it and coated with dark chocolate. 

Diane is right. Even before the Hershey bar, Look! was my favorite. Sigh... Those were the days...

No Blood? What!?!?

I went for a blood test a week ago. It was a long wait. They must be short of phlebotomists on the island. When it was finally my turn, the technician asked me if I might faint during the blood draw. I said I haven't before and should be fine. She told me to be sure and let her know if I was uncomfortable. I told her I’d be OK and smiled reassuringly which she, of course, couldn't see because I was wearing a mask.

She tied the rubber strap on my upper arm and told me to clench a fist. She then got the needle ready along with the two vials she’d be taking. 

OK… I looked away. I never like to see the needle being inserted.

OK… That was very good. I (sort of) hardly felt the pinch. I told her she was great. I was happy to get that part over with.

But then she seemed to be struggling with the vial or something.

When I turned to look there was no blood. How is that possible? That’s the first time I didn’t produce any blood after a needle was inserted. Didn’t I drink enough liquids? Am I dehydrated? She kept tapping my arm with a gauze. Nothing. Totally clean.

I knew she was very nervous about asking to stick me again, but I told her to go ahead and do it and she did. No, I didn’t look. OK… that pinch was more of a punch but thank goodness it was a gusher.

When I got home, I saw the two little dots that showed where the needle pokes were. And it was a little black and blue. The pokes are close together but one is a gusher and one is not.  

I wonder if that’s what it’s like when they drill for oil.

Sheesh!

Has this ever happened to you?

Pigeon Wars III

Right now... it's a question of who will give up first, the pigeons or Art.

The pigeons are not showing any sign of giving up so far and neither is Art. 

You might recall that Art first started trying to get the pigeons to stay off our roof and our solar panels by shooting water at them. That worked for a while, but they always came back. Ummm... I also mentioned that it's... uuuummm... perhaps wasting water? The birds also learned to just move up to a higher part of the roof where the water spray couldn't reach them.

So I suggested using little ice pellets that I could freeze for him. This now entailed him climbing onto the lower part of the roof to throw a bunch of the pellets at them. OK... that sort of worked. But it was making his arm ache.

The pigeons also moved to an even higher part of the roof and I wasn't thrilled with Art on top of any roof.

So I bought a slingshot. 😁 It was a little tricky at first for Art to get a hang of how far to pull back that rubber sling and keep the melting pellet in it.

The nice thing is that even one little pellet can bang on the roof and startle the pigeons away. 

However, the problem was the ice pellets. Because they are rounded on the bottom, it's hard to keep it in the sling thing. The pellets would get slippery and hard to hold. Art thought ice CUBES would probably be better.

Guess what I found on Amazon. Yup. Tiny cube shaped pellets. And yes, these are great. The ice cubes fall out much more easily from the trays and Art says they stay in the sling shot as he's aiming.

The thing is...

Art says sometimes, the pigeons will see him coming and fly away before he's got his slingshot ready.

I hope you realize that if you call someone a birdbrain, it can also be a compliment because those pigeons may have figured Art out. He could even swear the other day that while he was driving out of the garage, several pigeons flew onto our roof knowing he was out of range. 🙄

Sigh...

Missing Those Fall Colors

Art and I used to love walking in the woods when we lived in Illinois. One of our favorite places to go for fall colors was Harms Woods in Glenview, Illinois. We've been there with our kids and our granddaughter. 

Our daughter, Tiffany didn't want me to miss the beauty of nature's colors this year so she sent me these photos that she took when they all went there this past weekend.

Sigh....

Google Lens

One of the great things about blogging that I love is what I learn from other bloggers. Christine of Christine's Blog did a post about Google Lens. She explained how she used that app to find out what a certain kind of flower was.

The only problem was I didn't know what app that was because Google has so many apps. Darn! I discovered it's right there on my Google Pictures app. Duh!

So then I clicked on that and found these. See that red circle I put around that icon? That's the Google Lens. Arrrghhh... I didn't know what that was and had never bothered to try it. 

So I pulled up that photo of mom's orchid from my photo gallery and clicked on that Google Lens thingy. You might have noticed that I called mom's orchid an orchid because I didn't know what kind it was.

What do you know? Now we all know what it is.

So I proudly told Art about this cool function and what did he say? "You didn't know this? Your brother showed me how to use it a couple months ago." 🙄

Comparing Our iPhones

Two of mom's orchid plants had bloomed and I thought I'd share it with you. I took a bunch of photos and saw that something about that fuchsia color just wasn't turning out very clearly. 

My iPhone has been acting up lately. And so has my iPad. The iPad just doesn't respond at times to my finger swiping. (POSTSCRIPT: Art just told me to reboot my iPad and... well... what do you know? It's working fine again.) 😆

Anyway, I asked Art to use his iPhone 12 to see if his pictures would turn out better.

Yup. It was better.

And here's another one he took.

OK... Fine. I'm sure he'll tell you it's got something to do with the photographer.

I'll bet mom will say it's got something to do with the gardener. 😂

What's Your Favorite Chicken Carry-Out?

When I was teaching in Illinois, a friend of mine introduced me to Brown's Chicken's Buffalo wings. The store happened to be a short walking distance from our school so she and I would go and get it once a week (could it have been twice?) for lunch.

Well... my cholesterol jumped. The doctor asked me what I was eating and I said chicken. 

"What part of the chicken?" he asked. 

So I confessed and he said I should stop getting it so often. 

Darn!

So I stopped eating wings. Buuut... I have tried Hardees, Kentucky Fried Chicken, El Pollo Loco, Chick-fil-A, Popeye's, Boston Market, Zippy's Broasted (That's what they used to call it.) Chicken, etc. 

I rarely eat fried chicken anymore. (Scout's Honor) I'm trying to be good. I really am. However, a new chicken franchise came to Hawaii and all our friends tried it. I remember a blogger mentioning Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers but we resisted getting it.

But then.... one night we decided we'd go ahead and buy some for dinner. Geeee... The menu really is just chicken fingers. Even the sandwich just has fried chicken fingers in it. 

Our daughter, Tiffany warned us to eat it with the sauce.

So OK... We were ready. 

Art bought the Caniac Combo which had 6 chicken fingers and then 3 more fingers (as a side order) just in case. 

Although the 3 fingers were a side order, they had another sauce, toast and fries. 

That was a lot of food. The fingers were quite large so 2 a piece was more than enough.

Mom had a finger for lunch the next day and Art made a sandwich with 2 of them since I didn't much care for it.

The drink was so large that we split it between the three of us.

I did make a little green salad to go with it. 

OK... So what did we think?

Mom liked it a lot. She loved that the fingers were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. She liked the sauce too. Let's face it, mom likes carry-out food... any kind of carry-out food. 

Art liked the tenderness and juiciness of the chicken fingers and said the sauce was OK. The problem for Raising Cane's is that they only have one kind of sauce.

You have to remember that I have lost my sense of smell and actually don't have a full sense of taste. Therefore, the chicken was boring and not worth the glucose it would raise in my blood. And the sauce was too mild. That's why I gave Art my chicken finger for his lunch the next day.

Would we go back there again? I don't think so. 

I think the problem for Raising Cane's is going to be their extremely limited menu. It's a chicken finger restaurant. After an initial rush of people trying this new place, we're not seeing a lot of crowds around the store anymore.

I saw online that Raising Cane's is part of the Panda Express Restaurant Group. I thought that was interesting.

Looks like Chick-fil-A will come to Oahu. It's on Maui now. At least they have more sauce options. 

What is your favorite chicken place?

So Far Away

The last time we saw our son and his family was in December, 2019 just before the pandemic began. We hoped to see them this year, but in spring, Keola told us that they were moving to Sri Lanka.

What? Where the heck is Sri Lanka? But we had a cruise scheduled until late May. Keola felt they'd be so busy that it wouldn't be a good time for us to fly to Maryland in July since they were leaving in August. We also had a bunch of doctor's appointments scheduled for all of us around that time. Whatever the case, they had a bunch of unfortunate delays and they ended up leaving in early September.

Keola said they'd always told us they wanted to go overseas. 

"I know." I said, "But I guess I hoped you guys had forgotten about that." Both Keola and my daughter-in-law met when they were Peace Corps Volunteers so I supposed it's how they view their lives.

Around that time, we heard news about the citizens storming the presidential palace in Colombo. Accck! 

"Not to worry," said Jon. Unlike the January 6th insurrection here, the people even waited in lines to storm the palace and did not seek to destroy it like the Trump supporters did at the U.S. Capitol. 

We were still anxious but the day arrived of their departure. 

They flew out of Washington's Dulles International Airport. It was a 12 hour flight to Doha (capital of Qatar) with an 8 hour layover before their 5 hour flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Needless to say, they were exhausted as my grandson is showing here as he mimicked the statue.

So what is Colombo like? I was rather surprised. It's a city. Keola told me guns are banned here. No kidding? Awesome! It'll be safer than the U.S.

They've already visited an aquarium and had fun at a children's park train ride. One thing that unnerves the boys are people staring and wanting to take a photo with them. The other thing is the food. It is very spicy and right now, Keola is trying to figure out what sort of food they can get for them. 

I guess he and my daughter-in-law had always planned this sort of life for themselves.

Art and I will have to adapt.

Helpful Hint from Myrtle

I recently ran into my Zumba friend, Myrtle at the mall. We talked about missing our Zumba group and how it all ended with the pandemic. Anyway, it reminded me of the helpful hints she used to email us. 

I tried this one a long time ago and it really does work because I did have some stubborn zippers.

Then I thought I'd experiment with another of those helpful hints.

I have a bunch of glasses that did come out of the dishwasher with that rather unattractive cloudiness so I thought I'd try it.

There was that cloudiness on the entire glass. So I got out our white vinegar, soaked a paper towel and wiped the inside and outside.

Uuuummmm....

Nuts! Now I've got streaks of cloudiness. OK, I'm sure if I spent more time and vinegar on the glass, it could come out much cleaner looking... but heck. I'm not that finicky about our glassware.

Ahhhh wellll....

Helpful Hint from John in Canada: Ctrl Z

I love how we bloggers learn from each other.

I'm remembering a post that Celia of Celia's Blue Planet wrote where she'd inadvertently written a post and erased it by mistake.

John of The AC is On explained how you can use Ctrl + Z to undo an action you regret. Don't put the + though. Just press the Ctrl button and then z. 

Yes, I knew about the reverse arrow when you're writing a post but the Ctrl z is great when you're doing other things on your computer.

I looked up Keyboard shortcuts on Windows and found other helpful hints. 

Advance-Africa.com also had more Cntrl key shortcuts. They explain Apple keyboards also:

Apple control key

Apple command key on Apple computer keyboards the Ctrl key is written as "control" and is next to the option key and command key as shown in the picture to the right.

As far as the placement, the control keys are found in the same location as the Ctrl keys on an IBM computer.

I do often use the Ctrl + c to copy something and then Ctrl + v to paste it elsewhere. My brother taught me those. I don't think I can remember much else, but these three shortcuts are sure helpful.

Thank you, John of The AC is On. 

Crispy Cosmic Crisp

One of Art's cousins went to Seattle and got to try an apple called Cosmic Crisp. She liked it so much that she brought some back and gave us several to try. We usually buy an apple called Envy that is very popular here in Hawaii. It was my Zumba buddies (before the pandemic halted the classes) that introduced me to Envy so that's what we buy all the time from Sam's Club. It's a little bit on the pricier side, but not bad. 

Well, after trying the Cosmic Crisp, we decided it was just as crispy as Envy and tasted almost the same. That's what Art said anyway because my sense of taste is very bad now. However, I can tell you it IS very crispy. 

When we went to Sam's Club recently, they didn't have Envy, BUT they had Cosmic Crisp! What a surprise! And it was a couple of dollars cheaper for the big bag than Envy.

Art and I share an apple every day at lunch. It's to balance out the unhealthier teeny bit of potato chips we also have with our sandwich. 

I wonder how long the Cosmic Crisp season will last. Ah well... we'll enjoy it while we can.

POSTSCRIPT:

Oh darn! 

Although most of the apples were fine, too many were brown and discolored on the inside. Surprisingly, it was still relatively crisp, but I had to toss them out. I wonder if that's why they were selling them for a lower price.

We went back to Sam's Club another day and saw they had Envy, BUT they were NOT crispy. What the heck! This is usually the time we went apple picking in Illinois. Why are these not great?

Bambucha Blueberries!

OK... 

Still not much to write about so I'm digging deep

...into my fridge.

Aha! THE BLUEBERRIES!

The blueberries we get at Sam's Club and Costco have been more or less normalish size from what we've been used to getting in Hawaii, BUT the last two times we bought them they were gigantic. I told Art they could be grape size. The problem with gigantic blueberries is that they aren't great for my muffins. They take up too much room.

Art prefers these bambucha (pronounced: bum boo cha) blueberries for his cereal or oatmeal in the morning. Bambucha is Hawaiian pidgin for really, really big.

Unfortunately, eaten alone, we discovered that they are more tart than sweet. One of my friends even said they were so tart, she didn’t care for them.

The label says they're from Peru. I wonder what they use for fertilizer. Granted, Art remembers large blueberries in Indiana. That brought back memories of our trips there to pick blueberries with friends and our kids in July (when we lived in Illinois). As I recall, those blueberries were wonderfully sweet.

And that is a bambucha memory I will always treasure. I don't think that's the proper use of the word... but oh well.

Lettuce Find Something to Write About

OK....

I'm hitting a dry spell here on ideas for a blog post so Art suggested I write about wilted lettuce. (I happened to be soaking my lettuce at the time.)

"Nope," I said. "I've already written about lettuce."

But guess what. Although I did write about a wasp in my lettuce and how to wash lettuce, I've never specifically written about wilted lettuce. 😁

So here goes.

We were at the market two days ago and Art was looking at the green leaf lettuce. They looked awful... wilted beyond hope...almost beyond hope. And we needed the lettuce for sandwiches and salads. I told him I could try to perk them up.

(If I'd known I was going to write about this, I would have taken a BEFORE photo. Therefore you'll just have to take my word for it that they looked pretty terrible. The reason I bought them was because they were all green.)

The problem was... I forgot to work on them until today so they looked even more sad. Still I broke off the stem (to soak up water better) and left them to crisp up.

A half hour later, I was relieved to say they looked beautiful. I put them in my salad spinner and gave it a whirl. I then stored them in containers with a sheet of paper towel.

Once the lettuce is used in each container, I dry the paper towels and save them to clean the stove.

So there you have it. My magic method of saving wilted lettuce.

Hmmm.... Now what to write for Wednesday. Sigh...🤔