Moong Dal is one of my favorites. It's amazingly simple, cheap as hell, freezes well, and so delicious. I recommend not omitting the hari chutney, but if you don't like cilantro, parsley works pretty well too. We usually pair it with rice of some kind.

We also like using TVP instead of ground meat in lots of applications. It makes awesome tacos and chili, and is a fairly decent pizza topping if you season liberally and keep it under the cheese so it doesn't get too crispy. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, in which case go for it.

I feel I hit the universal lottery when it comes to online dating, but as mentioned, just be yourself and don't expect anything and you might be surprised. Best case, you find your partner and love of your life. Maybe you'll find some people that you enjoy their company for a while and find yourselves incompatible in the long run, but remain friends.

My experience was that I was looking for friendship and people that I could connect with, and I made that well-known. I wasn't looking for anything serious at all, let alone a husband. But life is full of surprises.

Seek friendship, and who knows what will happen.

In my 11 years at my transportation job, I've known a number of folks that have either had massive strokes, heart attacks, or have been injured to the point of permanent disability. The latter is what I worry about the most. Repetitive injury is a phrase that can't possibly exist to our "safety" management, though I also know a similar number of people that have been put on light duty, temporary disability, or even extensive surgeries related to doing the same thing day in and day out.

All that doesn't even begin to touch upon the various drug and alcohol abuse that is prevalent in my particular line of work, between hourly and management alike. These are possibly relevant to the aforementioned strokes or heart attacks.

Layoffs are rare for those I directly work with, the insurance is incredible, it's a lot of exercise, and pay is not an issue with enough seniority, so I think it boils down to poor management and demand for more production with fewer people in order to increase profits and appease shareholders. Hard work is rewarded with even more work.

But as keifermiller said, employer negligence is definitely an issue. There are plenty of ways I can be easily hurt to the point of permanent disability or even death, and they can certainly be mitigated, but that would hurt production and therefore profit.

I typed up a whole rant and then accidentally closed out of my browser so now I'm salty. Here we go.

Some back story: my maternal family is quite large, and composed of all walks of life. Healthcare and related fields are prominent in the family though - I have family that are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, researchers, etc. Okay.

My sister posted an article about recent measles outbreaks in the KC area. We happen to have a cousin who is vehemently anti-vaccination. Her kids are great, but her youngest is low-functioning autistic, which I assume is the source of her extremism.

Much of the family expresses distress at the measles outbreak. Anti-vax cousin mentions "measles isn't deadly." That's pretty much where it begins. Many give her various reputable sources of information that measles is not only absolutely deadly, but easily avoidable with vaccines that are fucking effective and fucking safe.

End result - she cuts off her family that is apparently not supporting her and her struggle with her autistic child. I want to point out that she has referred to all of her kids as "damaged." I hope to whatever higher power that those kids don't ever find any of her various posts, because this wasn't the first time.

This isn't the first time I've had a relationship cut off for something stupid. It's tough the first time, but ultimately, it's a two way street. And in this case, as long as she keeps her plague-ridden children away from my elderly grandmother and my organ-transplant uncle, I don't honestly think I give a shit.

Like I said, her kids are good kids, and I don't blame them at all for any of this. I hope that someday they come of age and right their wrongs. I was talking to my mother about this, and apparently my anti-vax cousin had already cut off the entirety of her husband's family for opposing her "opinion" about vaccinations.

Ugh. I can't say I'm too upset about the end result of the whole thing. It was a long time coming.

That is a fantastic time and definitely something to be proud of!

It's not a dedicated weather app, I just keep a link to weather.gov for my zip code on the home screen of my phone. The storage space on my phone is limited, so it works well for my purposes. The hourly weather forecast alone is fantastic, and it's all totally free.

For sure though, if you're looking for an app, Wunderground is the way to go.

As it so happens, I think you're pretty wonderful too. <3

Holy moly. I can't recommend the recipe enough. keifermiller told me about the bots attacking this particular post. I can't say I recommend any of them to be honest

100% agree. New Vegas overall with its choices and factions makes a superior gameplay experience. However, the Mojave vs the Capital Wasteland is so surprisingly different. I enjoy exploring more in FO3; it feels more satisfying somehow.

The Capital Wasteland really felt like just that - a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Terrible things happened there and it showed everywhere. The Mojave felt like it was (obviously) a desert to begin with, and the real devastation was mainly concentrated on Vegas proper. In FO3 there's a feeling of isolation, which changed a lot with NV and the various factions, in my opinion.

It's been a while since I've pubski'd or contributed at all. Lurking is my life.

Work is garbage. Keifer knows - the entire company is behind big time, and peak season has just begun. If you haven't made your orders for Christmas already, you should get on that ASAP. Also, you should pray to whatever deity you prefer that things make it intact. There are ~17 days left before things will definitely be late for December 25th. The hours are awesome and the money is fantastic but the physical abuse is already taking its toll. 11 years in the industry have numbed me to most of the mind games from local upper management, so I guess that's a plus?

I've been playing a lot of Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 in my off time. Mostly 3 recently. I put so many hours into it back when it first released, and I am reminded now how good it was. The environment is so engaging compared to New Vegas, in my opinion. There have been some situations I can feel my heart rate rising, and I find myself actually a little afraid as to what will happen. The game has aged so well and I'm so glad to be able to enjoy it all over again.

I've been half-assed knitting a hat for a coworker. It'll get done eventually, but when I get done with the work shitstorm, I don't feel like doing much anymore besides binge watching things or just idly dicking around on the internet. I might get it done by Christmas. I do thrive on the pressure of deadlines, so that might just be it.

I really like that hat! (I'm primarily a hat knitter, and cables on hats make me so happy.) Took me a long time to build up the courage to try cabling, but like much of my knitting adventures I realized that I was psyching myself up for something that isn't really all that scary at all.

For both projects, what yarn did you use?

Slightly past "this week" in regards to the intent of this post, but I picked up Fallout 3 on the autumn Steam sale, so that's been my current go-to game. Work is a horrible shitstorm so it's been nice to have something to fall back on that is really deep and also familiar. I played this for many many hours back when it released, so it's fun to revisit something that I haven't seen for ~10 years.

New Vegas was my recent go-to, and I enjoyed what I played. I admittedly toggled god mode and blew through the main quest for the story experience, and it was very cool. I appreciated how many choices I had for so many seemingly insignificant things. I've been popping in and out of seeing keifermiller's playthrough, and his is much more interesting than what I experienced.

A coworker is selling us his Xbone in the next couple of weeks, and I'm pretty excited for that. It's been a long time since I've played any kind of reasonably current-gen games. I'm not entirely sure where to start with that, though.

He didn't extrapolate the lengths we went to (~250 round trip miles and 16 inches of ridiculous sandwich) in order to pick up this printer. But it doesn't matter, he's so excited about this and I'm so happy about that.

Can confirm the whole bar tape saga. Very tense in the Miller household that day. I'll also confirm that there was a fair amount of (edit: subdued) excitement when the guy came out of the basement with the shifters.

So done with American Psycho. I wanted to be scared by Patrick Bateman, not so irritated by him. I got to yet another chapter where he and his shitty friends were discussing "rules" of clothing, and I wanted to throw my Kindle.

Back to A Song Of Ice And Fire for me. I never quite gave it a proper chance the first time I tried to read it, and I'm appreciating it much more the second time around. Granted, I'm only ~150 pages into the first book, but it's so refreshing after reading a bunch of genuinely mediocre fiction (lookin' at you, Neil Gaiman).

I did knit a couple of baby hats a few weeks ago for my coworkers who are having a baby in October, but that's been the only real FO I've felt like I needed to finish, and baby hats are not much of a time commitment. Every year I think I'm not going to procrastinate any Christmas knitting but I always do. This year I don't plan on doing any, and if any gets done then that's just a bonus.

I definitely understand the therapeutic aspect of keeping the hands busy. I've kind of been in a weird funk lately and need to -make- something. With the cross-stitching I get to fulfill that need to create.

I've been really enjoying seeing peoples' pictures of the eclipse, so I'm looking forward to seeing yours too! In 2024 Keifer and I are going someplace where we don't have to travel the day of to see totality. Possibly somewhere in Texas, but the path is so open to possibilities that we have some time to plan.

So. My first Pubski. Let's do this already.

Books

I've been reading American Psycho. I finally watched the movie after it being on my "To Watch" list for approximately oh 17 years, but I saw and enjoyed it, and decided to read the book. To say I'm enjoying it so far is a little so-so. I'm almost halfway through, and I understand why he's so obsessed with what people are wearing and how much they paid for it, but the word "hardbody" makes me roll my eyes every single time I see it, and it's in there A LOT. This may be one of the rare occasions where I actually enjoy the movie more than the book.

Next on my list - reread A Song of Ice and Fire. The show is ridiculously good, and I never gave the books much of a chance. keifermiller says that the books are better in this case, so I'll give it a genuine shot this time.

Crafting?

I've wanted to brew some beer, but I've been a little meh about my homebrew. It all has the same weird off flavor to it, and it's not particularly cost effective. Fun and enjoyable to watch, but an expensive hobby.

Knitting has been uninspired, as summer tends to do. There's nothing I want to do less than knit warm things when it's hot out, so that's on hold.

I did decide to cross-stitch a piece for my sister-in-law and her fiance for their upcoming marriage. This is by far the biggest thing I've ever done, and my tendency with these sorts of things is to bite off more than I can chew (this project is ~8000 stitches), but since it's only two colors, I think I can manage this. It's been so long since I've done any cross-stitching and it's refreshing.

Other

Floated down Missouri's Niangua River with my sisters and our friend this past weekend. The last time we went was a pretty shit time. I had to babysit drunk people and the river was low and there was just a whole mess of unpleasantness. This time was SO MUCH MORE FUN. We got storms on Friday night, and that was exciting in tents, but it got the river level up enough on Saturday that we weren't dragging our canoe much of the trip. Everyone had fun but did so responsibly, and I got some ghost pepper beef jerky from Osceola Cheese. My sisters and I have been out there several times now, and this was by far the best.

The eclipse was yesterday, and the initial plan for keifermiller and I was to head north of town 90 or so minutes to see totality. Woke up, checked the weather, clouds and rain and general shit weather. I wasn't prepared to drive that far for such disappointment, so we decided to stay in town and see the 99.7% or so eclipse.

Clouds. We had clouds from the start of the eclipse (I did see the first few minutes through my potentially dangerous glasses) til it was over. I was pretty bummed about the whole thing, but it wasn't a total loss. At peak eclipse it got so much darker than I imagined it would, and it was still so eerie to see at 1pm. I'm not messing around in 2024.

From the KC area, I can attest to the fact that traffic here is the easiest I've ever experienced anywhere. When I visited friends in Chicago I was floored when I learned that the 20-ish mile drive from downtown to the suburb we were headed to could take at least three hours. Going from La Guardia Airport to a different part of Lawn Guyland was a nightmare, and that was midday.

Things like this make me appreciate that my daily 35 mile, ~40 minute commute one way is not anywhere as bad as it could be.

I worked at a smoothie shop for a few years, and by far my favorite was a mango green tea smoothie. I don't recall the exact ratio of ingredients, but it included thawed frozen mango, matcha powder, water, some of your sweetener of choice to your level of preference (mine is typically very low), ice if your blender can handle it, milk or yogurt if it can't.

We did also make a coffee-style smoothie, but the owners insisted on using instant coffee powder. Same thing pretty much, a little water or milk or both, sweetener if you like it, coffee (the stronger the better), and ice. A lot of folks ordered it with chocolate syrup as a mocha style.

These days I like to toss in some chia seeds or protein powder for thickener. You can even use silken tofu for some filling protein, if you're using it as a meal replacement.

Raccoon thread?!

After I took this and posted it to social media, my father suggested that I "stay away from the sharp end."

The Art of the Deal.

Do what I've said for the past two years, or I'll look bad. If you don't agree, I resort to begging til you agree.

"But you cannot say that to the press. The press is going to go with that and I cannot live with that." - Donald "Fucking Tool" Trump

Today I spent a better part of my morning doing some experimenting.

First project: vegan apple banana muffins (plus bonus mini loaf because I ran out of muffin space)!

(mini loaf not pictured, it was a dumpy ugly little thing)

This went okay. I did alter the recipe somewhat. Since I didn't have soy milk handy, I substituted water and added another tsp of oil or so for the lost fats, as well as adding ~1 tbsp light corn syrup for a touch more sweetness. I also added in 3 tsp of chia seeds, which don't really add flavor but a bit extra texture and some nutrition. I didn't totally love the end result, but I didn't throw them out, either. I don't suspect I'll be making this one again.

-----

Second today: regular old fashioned banana nut bread!

(my photography skills are not as honed as keifermiller's)

This is the very recipe I posted in the last baker's thread, except this time I made it exactly to the recipe and ho-lee shit this is the best banana bread I've ever made. I know I said last time I said I didn't miss the butter flavor in the end result, and that was true, it was still good, but this is miles ahead better than the last loaf. This will absolutely be going in my "holiday baking" cache of recipes.

It's been YEARS since I've done legitimate karaoke and not just drunkenly serenading the dog, but I always thought that Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" was a good karaoke song. It's upbeat, not very long, most people know it. and enjoy singing along during the "lalalalala"s.

This week - vegan(-ish) banana bread!

This was the recipe I started with and tweaked. Instead of butter I used vegetable shortening, and instead of an egg I used flax meal (1 tbsp meal, 2.5 tbsp water). I'd never used flax in anything before. I call it vegan-ish because of the white sugar, but I have no idea if the brand of sugar in our cabinet was refined with bone char or not.

I also added in some sliced almonds (maybe 1/2 cup or so) and a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds for a little extra texture.

I was very happy with how this turned out. I thought for sure I would have missed the butter flavor, but not at all. The almonds and seeds give it a nice varying texture. The flax egg held the loaf together better than I expected, and I'm feeling very positive about future quick breads of this vein using that instead of eggs.

Those salad recipes look amazing and I'm absolutely going to try them. They seem like they'd be perfect for the kind of weather we're having here right now (~100F and miserable).

EDIT: Tried the Whole Foods salad today, thought it sounded better than turning on the oven or stove when the weather is actually hell outside. It tastes amazing and was ridiculously easy to make. This recipe is going down in my go-to list of meal prep/potluck foods for sure. Thank you!

First off, as someone who has been around various forums for years - it feels wrong for me to be posting in a thread that is (as of now) 801 days old, but from what I understand that is not unusual around these parts.

I'm Stephanie. I signed up for hubski a few years back and have basically just lurked, as is my M.O. around the internet. I'm rather fond of Keifer, who introduced me to this site in the first place. I'm not much of a contributor, but I have certainly enjoyed the quality posts that people make and the resultant discussion (without the reddit-style shitposting everywhere).

It has taken me quite a while to understand the site layout, as it isn't particularly intuitive, even with the tutorial. Definitely still don't understand tags, but I suspect that will come with time.

I made some zucchini bread today!

There have been a few zucchini breads in my baking history using various recipes, but I decided to try this one today simply because it was described as the "best ever." keifermiller and I got the biggest zucchini I've ever seen at the farmer's market this past Saturday, and we split it into two different dishes to varying degrees of success. I did omit the nuts, which I regret in hindsight.

I didn't take any pictures of the process, but the end result looked acceptable (in my opinion.)

As for flavor? I was reasonably pleased. I wouldn't describe it as the "best ever" but it was pretty good.

I must respectfully disagree - hummus is not optional for this application.

Seriously though, this was good eatin.