As you arrive on the lift outside the Conference room this week all traces of the holidays recently past are now absent. In fact the wall opposite the lift now sports a large chalkboard counting down to what is apparently the next big event of Lethal:

As you enter the Conference room you see the dais is set with multiple workstation tables. Power, data and phone cables are strategically routed to leave safe walking zones. All the work stations are manned by pasty complexioned pocket protector bedeck geeks typing on keyboards at impressive speeds, made more so by the fact its being done one handedly while they alternately using the other hand to talk on phones, slurp coffee or beckon for Lethal’s attention. Lethal in rarely seen rolled up shirt sleeves and his bevy of quintuplet administrative vixens alternate between attending to geek queries and tapping away on tablets. One of the quints taps his shoulder and points to the assembled crowd. He nods finishes answering the questions of the Geek he’s been working with and then steps up to the podium.

Please excuse the hub bub up here folks. January 2nd sound the start of my busy season for my business as many of the businesses I deal with are on a calendar fiscal year. This means closing out of books, getting data to and from accountants recovering corrupted files dealing with virus and malware infected files preventing data mining by unauthorized sources and a myriad of other tasks in a rather compressed time frame. In the remaining 97 day I expect to bill roughly 2/3rds of my income from my primary business for 2015. As you can imagine I really don’t have much time to waste which is part of the reason I didn’t go back to school this semester. It appears after several years of rather anemic business I’m going to be (thankfully) very busy this year. Unfortunately the room I normally use seasonally here to house my temporary help and visiting clients has been appropriated by Impish to house his overflowing stock of pies. So I have been forced to use the Conference Room in part.

However, since the geeks have agreed to be paid partly in (Impish’s) pies and pizza pies, plus all the brown gold they can swill I expect to regain use of the other room shortly once Impish realizes pies are disappearing from is over stock and he moves them someplace else as equally inconvenient to someone lese.

In last weeks issue you might have noticed 2 things, one there were no opening remarks and Impish making mention of a fairly potent Holiday Punch I make effecting him. I have to confess that over sampling of the punch well before quitting time was responsible for my forgetting the opening remarks. As you can see from the opening banner, the sole mortal who managed to score a glass of it is still flying quite high.

5 Ways You’re Drinking Coffee Wrong

322 Days until next Thanksgiving

Sleeping with the Dragon

The guys were all at a deer camp. No one wanted to room
with Impish, because he snored so badly. They decided it wasn’t
fair to make one of them stay with him the whole time, so they
voted to take turns.
 
The first guy slept with Impish and comes to breakfast the next
morning with his hair a mess and his eyes all bloodshot.
 
They said, “Man, what happened to you?”
He said, “Impish snored so loudly, I just sat up and watched him all night.”
 
The next night it was a different guy’s turn. In the morning, same
thing, hair all standing up, eyes all bloodshot.

They said, “Man, what happened to you? You look awful!”

He said, ‘Man, that Impish shakes the roof with his snoring.
I watched him all night.”

The third night was Lethal’s turn. Lethal was a wise, older
fellow, with a reputation for not taking crap. The next morning
he came to breakfast  bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “Good morning!” he said.
They couldn’t believe it.  They said, “Man, what happened?”

He said, “Well, we got ready for bed. I went and tucked Impish
into bed, patted him on the butt, and kissed him good night. After
that, Impish sat up and watched me all night.”

With age comes wisdom.

351 Days until Christmas 2015

We all ate really good for the holiday…and if you’re like Impish and I you’ve been eating good since Thanksgiving (hey it’s the holidays right?). Now with all those holiday bills coming to your mailbox any time now you’ll be trying to tighten you belt a notch (to make up for the 3 you let it out over the holidays). That can make January meals as cold and unappealing as the winter weather. So here are a couple of recipes that will feel holiday like but without all the holiday fuss and lengthy prep for those cold winter days ahead!

Sweet Potato Gratin with Shallots & Thyme

Ingredients:

3 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/8″-thick slices (about 2 pounds)
5 Tbsp. unsalted butter
2 large shallots, thinly sliced
3/4 cup Swanson chicken broth
3/4 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp. fresh thyme leaves
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/4 cup Japanese bread crumbs, (panko)
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
Salt
freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Brush bottom of a 9x13x2″ baking dish with 1 Tbsp. butter. Stir the bread crumbs, cheese and 2 Tbsp. butter in small bowl.
2. Heat remaining butter in a 10″ skillet over medium heat. Add shallots and cook 5 minutes or until tender and lightly browned. Remove skillet from heat.
3. Arrange half the sweet potatoes in the baking dish, overlapping slightly. Sprinkle with half the shallots. Season with salt and pepper. Repeat with remaining sweet potatoes and shallots. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Stir broth, heavy cream, thyme, and cayenne pepper in medium bowl. Pour broth mixture over sweet potatoes. Cover baking dish.
5. Bake 20 minutes. Uncover baking dish. Sprinkle with bread mixture.
6. Bake uncovered for 40 minutes or until sweet potatoes are tender. Let stand 10 min before serving.

Roast Pork with Green Apples & Golden Squash

Pork tenderloin is roasted with butternut squash and apple wedges and are served with a savory sauce with a hint of cinnamon.

Prep 20 min.

 Total 1 hr. 5 min.

Serves 8

What You’ll Need

1 1/2 pounds (2 tenderloins 3/4 pound each ) whole boneless pork tenderloins
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
3 large Granny Smith apples, cored and thickly sliced
1 butternut squash (about 1 1/2 pounds), peeled, seeded and cut into cubes
2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 medium onion, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 3/4 cups  Chicken Stock or Unsalted Chicken Stock
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour

How to Make It

• 1 Heat the oven to 425°F. Spray a roasting pan with vegetable cooking spray.
• 2 Brush the pork with the oil and season with the black pepper. Place the pork in the pan. Stir the apples, squash, brown sugar, cinnamon, onion and 1/2 cup stock in a large bowl. Add the apple mixture to the pan.
• 3 Roast for 25 minutes or until the pork is cooked through, stirring the apple mixture once during roasting. Remove the pork from the pan and keep it warm. Roast the apple mixture for 15 minutes or until it’s browned. Remove the apple mixture from the pan.
• 4 Stir the remaining stock and flour in a small bowl until the mixture is smooth. Stir the stock mixture in the pan. Cook and stir over medium-high heat until the mixture boils and thickens, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Serve the stock mixture with the pork and apple mixture.

Today’s Geography Lesson

I know that we are getting older and have short attention spans,
so this lesson will be kept short and sweet.

Geography Lesson of the day.

That concludes our Geography Lesson of the Day!

Thank you.  Take a nap and try not to hurt yourself.

Please pass on this valuable information to another old codger.

You’ll never love anything like this cat loves his spray bottle

Have you ever heard of cat owners using a spray bottle to deter their kitty from bad behavior? That definitely wouldn’t work on this cat! For some reason, he LOVES getting sprayed in the face by water. You have to see this wild cat video!

The year in review ~ for a Blonde

January – Took new scarf back to store because it was too tight.
February- Fired from pharmacy job for failing to print labels…..
“duh”….. bottles won’t fit in typewriter ! ! !
March – Got excited…..finished jigsaw puzzle in 6 months…..box/said “2-4 years !”
April – Trapped on escalator for hours…..power went out ! ! !
May – Tried to make Kool-Aid…..8 cups of water won’t fit into those little packets ! ! !
June – Tried to go water skiing…..couldn’t find a lake with a slope.
July – Lost breast-stroke swimming competition…..learned later, other swimmers cheated, they used their arms ! ! !
August – Got locked out of car in rainstorm…..car swamped, because top was down.
September – Lost a TV quiz show. The capital of California is “C”…..isn’t it ? ? ?
October – Hate M&M’s…..they are so hard to peel.
November – Baked turkey for 4-1/2 days…..instructions said 1 hour Per pound and I weigh 108 ! ! !
December – Couldn’t call 911…..”duh”…..there’s no “eleven” button On the phone ! ! !

WHAT A YEAR !!!!!

Smartest prank ever – from Brazil

Recently the CIA in the apparently role of the original classifying authority Admitted that roughly 1/2 of the UFO sightings in the 50’s & 60’s that caused such a frenzy and near panic was in fact what many had claimed all along, observed tests of secret US aircraft being tested.

Obviously this big reveal should have been a huge blow to the Alien Conspiracy/Area 51 theorist sects one would think. Nay! Nay! I say! It seems those same conspiracy theorist whom have never encountered a fact in evidence they couldn’t warp with their twisted logic/beliefs have simply added this to their beliefs unbelievable as that might seem.

It seems that half of them take this admission as proof that the 50% the CIA are not claiming responsibility for are therefore somehow legitimatized by this admission of the governments. The other half on the other hand seem to be of the opinion that as technology to examine evidence has become increasingly advanced another cover story and round of government roadblock to their truth seeking was required, hence the false and intentionally misleading confession of the CIA.

See what you think.

CIA admits: All those UFO sightings in 1950s? ‘It was us’

In an Aug. 4, 1955 photo provided by the CIA, the prototype U-2 spy plane is tested at what became known at Area 51 in Nevada. (AP Photo/CIA)

As far as “best of 2014” lists go, the CIA has a pretty irresistible one: On Dec. 22 it started tweeting links to the 10 most popular articles of the year that it shared on Twitter, and the agency arrived at No. 1 yesterday, tweeting: “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ’50s? It was us.” The accompanying link directs readers to The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974, a 272-page document from 1998 the CIA tweeted a link to in early July, reported KAKE at the time.

The upshot of the report is that the CIA was the culprit behind more than half of the UFO sightings logged in the 1950s and 1960s.

As VentureBeat reports, the CIA tested its U-2 spy planes at 60,000 feet, an altitude that seemed impossible for man to reach at the time—leading observers, specifically pilots, to suspect it wasn’t man up there at all.

VentureBeat highlights a portion of the report that explains that in the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners stuck below 20,000 feet; military aircraft kept it below 40,000 feet.

“Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.” The CIA actually cross-checked the UFO reports with its flight records, it noted in the document, but in instances when it verified the UFO was really a U-2, it stayed mum.

The report was part of documents declassified in 2013 that famously detailed the existence of Area 51 in Nevada.

For my part I’m not sure which I am more upset about;

The dogged disbelief by these conspiracy theorist in light of the admission and apparent collaborating evidence when coupled with a perfectly believable explanation.

The fact that all the ‘UFO’ sighting reports cannot be as easily explained (yet?) by records of other man made airborne objects either experimental or clandestine in origin.

Or finally that despite scientific and mathematical proof of the unlikelihood of our being alone in the cosmos, that any hope of proof that our sorry asses are not the only intelligent life in the Universe has just been made 50% less likely.